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Brian Moore's avatar

"There've been various trials of multivitamin pills, and if anything they seem harmful. "

This may be a case of "the trials weren't very good" or "weren't asking the question you think they were asking." I haven't done the research myself, but my wife (a physician) was saying that when she looked at them, they hadn't always done a good job of separating out the various vitamins (or their amounts) in a way that would let you determine if a vitamin D or C supplement of an effective amount was good/bad. She said that it might indeed show that the generic medium-dose multivitamins you buy don't actually help, but that it didn't necessarily say if taking a specific vitamin (perhaps at a much higher level, and without countervailing effects from vitamins you didn't need) is a good or bad idea.

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Katy's avatar

I think also vitamins, especially multivitamins, can a) not have what they say in them, and b) have random other shit in them. For example, there was a study in 2018 in Canada where they looked at testing prenatal vitamins and 40% were over the threshold for lead (it was only a sample of about 50 but even so) and a couple were also over the threshold for arsenic and/or thallium.

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