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hyporational comments on Open thread, September 22-28, 2014 - Less Wrong
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I don't know how many people here have medical or nutritional expertise, but for those who do, I have a question.
The benefits and risks of multivitamins have been discussed a little in the media, but as a layperson I find it difficult to look at the conflicting studies online and come to any particular conclusion as to what I should do.
Specifically, I am looking at this as a person with a chronic illness who finds it difficult to feed myself a diet as healthy as I would like due to money and time/energy constraints. I am therefore looking at supplementing eating as healthy as I can manage with a cheap multivitamin; but I would really appreciate if anyone with specialized knowledge, or just someone better at analyzing the available data than I currently am, could help me understand whether the reported risks are something I should be more concerned about than whatever benefit it may provide.
A basic blood panel is unlikely to tell you much about your micronutritional status if your diet is even remotely normal and you don't have problems with absorption i.e. gastrointestinal disease. The only vitamins they might sample would be vitamins D, B5 and perhaps B12 and folate. I don't think these are even part of any basic health check at least for younger people.
However if there are gross deviations in a basic blood panel then nutrition is probably the least of your problems.
Just thoughts of an MD from Finland, I'm not much of an expert on nutrition. I don't eat extremely healthily myself and based on this literature review I don't bother supplementing anything else than vitamin D, which I consume 50 ug a day. I wouldn't be scared of multivitamins either, while relative risks might look scary, the absolute risks involved are miniscule.
Thanks for the link and advice; I was basically looking for a review like that but lacking the studies-savvy to find it.