Five Reasons Why You Don’t Need Vitamin Supplements

Vitamin supplements are a huge industry, promising an easy fix for practically any form of ailment. However, studies are discovering that over consumption of supplements can worsen the prospects of being at risk from conditions such as arteriosclerosis, cancer, and heart disease. Here are just five of the arguments for why vitamin supplements aren’t really necessary.

1. Vitamin Supplements Don’t Protect From Disease

There’s no reason to doubt that foods rich in vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants can offer improved protection from degenerative and metabolic diseases such as cancer. In comparison, there’s a glaring absence of research to suggest that multivitamins taken daily could provide anywhere near the same level of defense as nutrients consumed through a normal diet. If anything, vitamin pill consumption can worsen the dangers by giving people an excuse not to maintain a responsible diet.

2. Supplements Can Actively Harm Your Health

Like any processed foodstuff, overconsumption can carry its own risks. Studies have actually suggested that men who regularly used vitamin supplements over a long period were around twice as likely to suffer prostate cancer as those weren’t taking vitamin pills.

3. Vitamin Supplements Can Hurt, Not Help, Exercise

The industry around workout supplements is hugely profitable, but there’s scientific evidence to show that supplementary doses of vitamins can actually reduce the benefits of regular exercise. Exercise is one of the most effective means of regulating the process of insulin generation, but studies have shown that quantities of vitamins C and E regularly found vitamin supplements (1000 mg and 400 IU, respectively) can reduce the metabolic gains in question that exercise encourages.

4. Much of the Vitamin Content is Simply Flushed Out

The body is naturally designed to vent nutrients in the digestive system that aren’t needed for optimum organ function. Given the quantities of vitamins often found in supplements, much of the so-called “nutritional” content of these products will simply be ejected through digestion, as evidenced by the brightly colored urine can take in the period following supplement consumption. Not only is this unnecessary and counterintuitive to improved health, but it also results in a serious waste of money.

5. You’re Not Getting the Full Dose

Where water soluble vitamin supplements are often simply flushed from the body, healthy eating sources like whole foods and fresh vegetables take much longer to breakdown, improving sustained absorption levels, providing a metabolic boost and providing further benefits in the way of slow-release energy and crucial dietary fiber. While there may be a role for a degree of supplement consumption in such a diet, in any more than a complimentary capacity, we run the risk of prioritizing shortcuts and miracle cures over solid and proven sources of nutrition.

(Author: Alex Norwood is a young writer, traveller, health food fan, and a promising web designer.)