Quantified Health Prize Deadline Extended

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Quantified Health Prize Deadline Extended — LessWrong

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tut14y-40

This ... comes from ...

Nope. This comes from the fact that when you do proper studies about overdosing (which is what you do with needless supplementation) various micronutrients you find that it is at best useless and at worst harmful. Then I added my own spin on the cause of it rather than listing studies for each chemical because I can't be bothered to write a meta study.

... if you want ... vitamin C ...

Then you should eat at least some fresh food. If you are a normal American or European you should probably also eat more fruit, but you don't need to worry about your vitamin C intake. (Unless you take more than ten times RDI ie one pill per day, in which case you should decrease your intake of vitamin C and still eat more fruit)

Edit: Based on jimrandomh's claim below I think that I should clarify that by "needless supplementation" I mean any supplementation done when it has not been demonstrated (eg with blood work at a clinic) that you have a deficiency of that particular mineral.

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wedrifid14y140

Edit: Based on jimrandomh's claim below I think that I should clarify that by "needless supplementation" I mean any supplementation done when it has not been demonstrated (eg with blood work at a clinic) that you have a deficiency of that particular mineral.

Bayes disagrees with you.

If you know that most people in your country (the United States for example) are deficient in vitamin D then prior to having blood work done, and absent any other evidence you have collected that suggests you are an exception, you should expect to be deficient in vitamin D.

4A1987dM14y

Dunno what you mean by “normal”, but I suspect the median American or European take significantly less vitamin C than would be optimal.

5thomblake14y

This reeks of status quo bias. How do you suppose that 'eat like a sane person' (as though that were precise advice) gives exactly optimal nutrition, with no gains to be had from any increase or decrease of anything? It seems vanishingly improbable that there is no substance that a human could benefit from getting slightly more or less of in the diet. Your comment about "overdosing" is correct, but irrelevant. Note that those studies often also demonstrate that people with bad diets actually do gain from taking multivitamins. The question isn't whether taking a bottle of vitamin C pills will prevent AIDS; the question is what the optimal intake of vitamin C is, relative if necessary to everything else. If, for example, there is a slight health benefit to be had from ingesting 1 mg less of msg and .001 mg more of riboflavin than people normally do, then your claim is false. How are you so sure that there are no such benefits for any substances?

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