DailyDirt: Take Your Vitamins... Or Not. Who Knows What's Good For You?

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

It's not always simple to know what's good for your health. We've seen that the placebo effect is far more complicated than it seems (or is usually presented) as its effects have grown stronger and stronger over the years across many clinical trials. Doctors themselves aren't always certain what's the "best" health advice, and they're constantly re-evaluating whether current recommendations are actually valid -- to develop better recommendations. Here are just a few links on vitamins and some of their (mistaken) benefits.

• Vitamin deficiencies are certainly something to avoid, but some folks are going a bit too far with their vitamins. There is little evidence that antioxidant supplements prevent any kind of disease, but advertisers encourage everyone to take vitamin A and other dietary supplements in vast excess. More is not necessarily better, especially when it comes to vitamins. [url]
• Studies come out all the time that correlate the intake of vitamins with various health benefits, but that's not supposed to lead us to taking more vitamins. You're probably not going to suffer from rickets any time soon, so lay off the vitamin D and just go outside occasionally. [url]
• The amount of iron in spinach was mistakenly thought to be much higher than other green vegetables, but spinach actually doesn't have an extraordinary amount of iron. People also thought that Popeye ate spinach for the iron, but Popeye actually ate spinach for its vitamin A content.... [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: antioxidants, dietary supplements, health, iron, placebo effect, popeye, spinach, vitamins