"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.
Yes I agree! I think Linus Pauling's arguments for why vitamin C might be great seemed quite strong, and I've always wondered why it didn't show much of an effect in practice. I start to wonder how careful they were to make sure that there was no r-ascorbic acid in the trials.
It seems that you can pretty much prove what you want with studies, and that they're never answering the question you were hoping to ask.
But on the other hand, if you've got something that really helps, it should show up in studies even if your enemies do them trying to prove you wrong. Everything about medicine is mysterious.
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.
> One of the few things we actually know about human nutrition is that there are some chemicals which we need in tiny quantities which we can't ourselves make.
Ha, hold my coffee...
I actually don't believe most of these. I've only looked into vA, vC, and essential fatty acids, and all of these theories seem like crap to me.
Did you know that the experiment in the Royal Navy that "proved" vC from fresh citrus cures scurvy had an n=2 and a 50% success rate? Yes literally 1 guy got cured. The other didn't. The guy (admiral? captain?) who ran the experiment didn't himself believe vC from citrus fruit was the solution, even if his superiors interpreted it that way.
vA is just as shoddy. Greg Generaux has been eating a as-free-from-vA-as-possible diet for nearly a decade, his vA serum levels are undetectable, and he has zero symptoms.
EFA has only been demonstrated even in animals by boiling their food in alcohol until all the FAs were removed. Even a white rice diet won't induce it. What else could possibly wrong with a diet where all food was boiled in alcohol for hours? Everything.
Several people I know don't believe o6 is actually essential, for various reasons.
Regarding the supplementation issues, there could be other factors in play besides what you said:
1. What if some X is good, but too much X is bad? Many supplements contain 10,000x the recommended dose. And our idea of what's actually necessary and thus recommended is probably total trash.
2. What if too much X crowds out Y, or blocks the Z pathway? We already know that vitamin C and glucose are so similar that they compete for some of the same pathways. E.g. when you put on a CGM, it warns you not to supplement vitamin C because that will artificially elevate the readings. Can confirm, I took vC for 2 weeks and it elevated my glucose reading by 40mg/dL, which puts me from perfectly fine into "definitely diabetic" range.
3. Some vitamins are water soluble (vC and vD I think) and some fat (vA). The fat soluble ones can accumulate in body fat, building up slowly over time. This is how the vA people justify vA being so toxic, similar to the PUFA storage theory. I think the water soluble ones just get peed out, so you have to work very hard to overdose on them.
> EFA has only been demonstrated even in animals by boiling their food in alcohol until all the FAs were removed. Even a white rice diet won't induce it. What else could possibly wrong with a diet where all food was boiled in alcohol for hours? Everything.
I suppose what you'd have to do here is feed them the alcohol-boiled stuff until they got ill and then add pure linoleic acid and see if they got better again.
I think linoleic acid is essential because it's what cardiolipin should be made out of, and we can't synthesise it. If both those things are true then it has to be essential.
But I agree that if it's so difficult to produce EFA deficiency then it probably doesn't matter in practice unless you're trying to design idealised optimal food pills for astronauts.
But even then, maybe something else broke that added LA can fix (in the short term?)
E.g. you were helped by taking thyroid, but that doesn't prove your thyroid was broken, or you were even low in endogenous thyroid hormones. Which IIRC you were not.
Do you know it's what cardiolipins are currently made of, or what they SHOULD be made of?
> Did you know that the experiment in the Royal Navy that "proved" vC from fresh citrus cures scurvy had an n=2 and a 50% success rate? Yes literally 1 guy got cured. The other didn't. The guy (admiral? captain?) who ran the experiment didn't himself believe vC from citrus fruit was the solution, even if his superiors interpreted it that way.
Well, yes, Lind's original experiment was hardly the platonic ideal, but it's possible to discover true things with bad methods.
And far be it from me to value epidemiological historical anecdata over a clinical trial, but a hundred years of the Royal Navy not getting scurvy while doing things like discovering Australia in sailing ships kind of convinces me that the limes in 'Limey' were doing something good.
Did you know that at the start of the 20th century they'd written off 'limes for scurvy' as a mediaeval superstition and as a result scurvy came back? It's complicated and really interesting. Read the Molds' article on this.
As for the antiscorbutic properties of ascorbic acid, I can't think of a more solid fact in biology. People since Lind have done better experiments. And we can demonstrate it in guinea pigs. And all the animals that can get scurvy have similar mutations in the vitamin C synthesis pathway.... etc.
There are vast numbers of facts that are explained by the vitamin C theory. Including how the polar explorers managed to get so confused they brought scurvy back.
No, I haven't read the literature in detail, and you *know* I don't trust medical "science", but if they've got this one wrong then I wouldn't trust them to tie their own shoelaces....
I will bet you any amount of money that you like that l-ascorbic acid is both cause and cure of scurvy. I'm not sure how we decide the bet though....
Vitamin A I know nothing about and I therefore make no comment. What's your best argument/link for why vitamin A is a lie?
I was largely convinced by Greg Generaux that "scurvy" is actually vA poisoning, haha. What did they eat? Oxidized, superheated, non-refrigerated cod liver oil and the like. It was mixed into almost all rationed foods back then for its "nutrients." Of course, it would be high in hyperoxidized omega-3 as well.
It's curious that no carnivore seems to have ever gotten scurvy. I did it for 90 days myself, no vegetables. Scurvy is supposed to set in within 4-6 weeks (another reason it's probably not a deficiency but a toxicity). WW2 POWs and camp survivors somehow didn't get scurvy even on pure white rice diets in the case of Japanese POWs.
Oh, sorry, yes, that should do it! If someone's eating pure white rice for years on end then they should be dead of all sorts of things, scurvy might even be the first one.
But I suspect that even in a Japanese death camp, you could find a bit of vitamin C somewhere. We don't need much and it's everywhere.
That's why I think optimizing for micronutrients is largely a waste of time, and at worst very harmful.
Effectively, if you're not a lab rat or an astronaut, you couldn't get a deficiency if you tried by "not eating enough of a micronutrient." You could create a combo where one crowds out another, but just eating more of the other doesn't necessarily fix that either.
Are they actually, technically essential to take in? I'm open to the idea, but I've seen enough fuckery that I don't accept this as true just because it's common wisdom.
"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.
Yes I agree! I think Linus Pauling's arguments for why vitamin C might be great seemed quite strong, and I've always wondered why it didn't show much of an effect in practice. I start to wonder how careful they were to make sure that there was no r-ascorbic acid in the trials.
It seems that you can pretty much prove what you want with studies, and that they're never answering the question you were hoping to ask.
But on the other hand, if you've got something that really helps, it should show up in studies even if your enemies do them trying to prove you wrong. Everything about medicine is mysterious.
"Everything about medicine is mysterious."
Definitely true and humorous, but don't throw up your hands in despair. You can find useful (and new) things, but it does take a lot more work. :(
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.
Yes, could be, and I don't in fact trust the people who do trials to check that their pills actually have what they should in them.
> One of the few things we actually know about human nutrition is that there are some chemicals which we need in tiny quantities which we can't ourselves make.
Ha, hold my coffee...
I actually don't believe most of these. I've only looked into vA, vC, and essential fatty acids, and all of these theories seem like crap to me.
Did you know that the experiment in the Royal Navy that "proved" vC from fresh citrus cures scurvy had an n=2 and a 50% success rate? Yes literally 1 guy got cured. The other didn't. The guy (admiral? captain?) who ran the experiment didn't himself believe vC from citrus fruit was the solution, even if his superiors interpreted it that way.
vA is just as shoddy. Greg Generaux has been eating a as-free-from-vA-as-possible diet for nearly a decade, his vA serum levels are undetectable, and he has zero symptoms.
EFA has only been demonstrated even in animals by boiling their food in alcohol until all the FAs were removed. Even a white rice diet won't induce it. What else could possibly wrong with a diet where all food was boiled in alcohol for hours? Everything.
Several people I know don't believe o6 is actually essential, for various reasons.
Regarding the supplementation issues, there could be other factors in play besides what you said:
1. What if some X is good, but too much X is bad? Many supplements contain 10,000x the recommended dose. And our idea of what's actually necessary and thus recommended is probably total trash.
2. What if too much X crowds out Y, or blocks the Z pathway? We already know that vitamin C and glucose are so similar that they compete for some of the same pathways. E.g. when you put on a CGM, it warns you not to supplement vitamin C because that will artificially elevate the readings. Can confirm, I took vC for 2 weeks and it elevated my glucose reading by 40mg/dL, which puts me from perfectly fine into "definitely diabetic" range.
3. Some vitamins are water soluble (vC and vD I think) and some fat (vA). The fat soluble ones can accumulate in body fat, building up slowly over time. This is how the vA people justify vA being so toxic, similar to the PUFA storage theory. I think the water soluble ones just get peed out, so you have to work very hard to overdose on them.
> EFA has only been demonstrated even in animals by boiling their food in alcohol until all the FAs were removed. Even a white rice diet won't induce it. What else could possibly wrong with a diet where all food was boiled in alcohol for hours? Everything.
I suppose what you'd have to do here is feed them the alcohol-boiled stuff until they got ill and then add pure linoleic acid and see if they got better again.
I think linoleic acid is essential because it's what cardiolipin should be made out of, and we can't synthesise it. If both those things are true then it has to be essential.
But I agree that if it's so difficult to produce EFA deficiency then it probably doesn't matter in practice unless you're trying to design idealised optimal food pills for astronauts.
But even then, maybe something else broke that added LA can fix (in the short term?)
E.g. you were helped by taking thyroid, but that doesn't prove your thyroid was broken, or you were even low in endogenous thyroid hormones. Which IIRC you were not.
Do you know it's what cardiolipins are currently made of, or what they SHOULD be made of?
For sure, this stuff is hard.
> Do you know it's what cardiolipins are currently made of, or what they SHOULD be made of?
Likely both I think, it would be big news if cardiolipin was wildly different in wild animals.
> Did you know that the experiment in the Royal Navy that "proved" vC from fresh citrus cures scurvy had an n=2 and a 50% success rate? Yes literally 1 guy got cured. The other didn't. The guy (admiral? captain?) who ran the experiment didn't himself believe vC from citrus fruit was the solution, even if his superiors interpreted it that way.
Well, yes, Lind's original experiment was hardly the platonic ideal, but it's possible to discover true things with bad methods.
And far be it from me to value epidemiological historical anecdata over a clinical trial, but a hundred years of the Royal Navy not getting scurvy while doing things like discovering Australia in sailing ships kind of convinces me that the limes in 'Limey' were doing something good.
Did you know that at the start of the 20th century they'd written off 'limes for scurvy' as a mediaeval superstition and as a result scurvy came back? It's complicated and really interesting. Read the Molds' article on this.
As for the antiscorbutic properties of ascorbic acid, I can't think of a more solid fact in biology. People since Lind have done better experiments. And we can demonstrate it in guinea pigs. And all the animals that can get scurvy have similar mutations in the vitamin C synthesis pathway.... etc.
There are vast numbers of facts that are explained by the vitamin C theory. Including how the polar explorers managed to get so confused they brought scurvy back.
No, I haven't read the literature in detail, and you *know* I don't trust medical "science", but if they've got this one wrong then I wouldn't trust them to tie their own shoelaces....
I will bet you any amount of money that you like that l-ascorbic acid is both cause and cure of scurvy. I'm not sure how we decide the bet though....
Vitamin A I know nothing about and I therefore make no comment. What's your best argument/link for why vitamin A is a lie?
I was largely convinced by Greg Generaux that "scurvy" is actually vA poisoning, haha. What did they eat? Oxidized, superheated, non-refrigerated cod liver oil and the like. It was mixed into almost all rationed foods back then for its "nutrients." Of course, it would be high in hyperoxidized omega-3 as well.
It's curious that no carnivore seems to have ever gotten scurvy. I did it for 90 days myself, no vegetables. Scurvy is supposed to set in within 4-6 weeks (another reason it's probably not a deficiency but a toxicity). WW2 POWs and camp survivors somehow didn't get scurvy even on pure white rice diets in the case of Japanese POWs.
Most carnivores can make their own vitamin C . There's vitamin C in meat. In almost all food, as long as you don't process it out.
My understanding is those Japanese POW camps gave them only a small amount of white rice daily, and nothing else, for years at time.
Oh, sorry, yes, that should do it! If someone's eating pure white rice for years on end then they should be dead of all sorts of things, scurvy might even be the first one.
But I suspect that even in a Japanese death camp, you could find a bit of vitamin C somewhere. We don't need much and it's everywhere.
That's why I think optimizing for micronutrients is largely a waste of time, and at worst very harmful.
Effectively, if you're not a lab rat or an astronaut, you couldn't get a deficiency if you tried by "not eating enough of a micronutrient." You could create a combo where one crowds out another, but just eating more of the other doesn't necessarily fix that either.
Are they actually, technically essential to take in? I'm open to the idea, but I've seen enough fuckery that I don't accept this as true just because it's common wisdom.
vD is fat soluble.
I gather that you probably also want vK if you're taking vD -- another way for supplementation to go wrong. (But I haven't really looked into it.)
Yea, my D comes with K(2). Thx for the correction on D being fat soluble!