Is 'vitamania' making Americans less healthy?
Lindsay Abrams
Salon
Sat, 21 Feb 2015
A, C, D, E, K and the eight Bs: There's a lot that can go wrong when we don't get sufficient amounts of these 13 chemicals in our diets. Things like pellagra, caused by a B3 deficiency and characterized by delusions, diarrhea and "scaly skin sores," or beriberi, which occurs in the dearth of B1 and can affect either the nervous or cardiovascular system, depending on which type you've got.
But in North America, vitamin deficiencies are a rarity. The nutrition-related health problems we do have to worry about are a lot different: obesity comes to mind, as does diabetes and hypertension. Incredibly enough, argues science writer Catherine Price, it's the fact that we've solved the former that's contributing to the latter: food companies add synthetic vitamins to otherwise unhealthy fare, preventing us from developing scurvy but also, at the same time, from following truly nutritious diets. "We use vitamins as insurance policies against whatever else we might (or might not) be eating," Price writes in "Vitamania: Our Obsessive Quest for Nutritional Perfection," "as if by atoning for our other nutritional sins, vitamins can save us from ourselves."
"The irony of our vitamin obsession," Price argues, is that "by encouraging the idea that isolated dietary chemicals hold the key to good health, our vitamania is making us less healthy."
Salon spoke with Price about this paradox, and about the best way to follow a healthy, vitamin-rich diet. (Hint: it doesn't involve shopping at GNC.) Our conversation, which follows, has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
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What are vitamins and, more importantly, what are they not?
I'm glad you started with that question, because it's something people get confused about all the time. Vitamins are technically only 13 dietary chemicals: A, C, D, E, K and then the eight B vitamins. There's actually no concrete chemical definition of what a vitamin is; they're basically these 13 chemicals that we get in small amounts from food to prevent specific deficiencies.
"Dietary supplements" is often also used synonymously with "vitamins," but that's a much larger category of basically any substance that can be used to supplement your diet. What I found really interesting when I was researching the book is that when I'd say I was writing a book about vitamins, most people would ask questions about things that weren't vitamins, which really showed how often we confuse those two terms.
"Dietary supplements" would be things like herbs?
Herbs, botanicals, basically anything at GNC that's not one of those chemicals. It's kind of funny: now, when I go into a drugstore, I try to pay attention to the aisles. What I've started to notice is that they'll have, like, greeting cards and then eye care and then vitamins, but if you look, it's just an entire aisle's worth of dietary supplements that they call vitamins.
There was that big scandal recently where a lot didn't even contain those herbs and botanicals, either.
It's weird because some people are saying they may have used the wrong testing methods, and there may be some validity to that, but it is true that there are huge quality-control problems with the supplement industry. It's dangerous to apply the aura of health that we associate with vitamins to all these other supplements.
That aura of health we associate with vitamins, especially when it comes to supplements — how legitimate is it? Do we over-attribute health benefits to them?
I think the aura of health we give to vitamins, in terms of safety, is pretty legitimate if we're taking vitamins in the amounts we could get from our diet. A multivitamin is probably not going to hurt people, even if there's disagreement over whether it will help. We tend to think that if a little is good then more is better, and that's definitely not true with some of the vitamins like A, where there's acute toxicity: if you take too much it'll damage your liver. And then, in general, we just don't know what the long-term effects are of taking high doses of any of the vitamins over time, and some studies suggest it can be harmful; taking beta carotene was shown to increase the risk of lung cancer, which is unfortunate.
In the broader idea of health, vitamins really are miraculous to someone with a true deficiency — for someone with scurvy or rickets, it's a cure that acts almost like a drug — but there really aren't that many benefits that have been proven to be associated with taking higher-than-normal doses of them. I think a lot of the things we assume about both vitamins and supplements aren't really substantiated by science.
A lot of the misconceptions you highlight in the book, like our adherence to recommended daily allowances (RDAs), seem to have occurred when vitamins jumped from scientists to food marketers.
We take RDAs as the gospel truth; someone out there knows exactly how much of each vitamin I need. It was interesting to realize that that's not the case at all. They change a lot. You know those labels on the back of food that tell you how much of your RDA of, say, vitamin E you're getting? Those are actually based on the recommendations from 1968, and there have been many updates since then. It's like, wait a second — this is based on out-of-date information.
You also argue that when we isolate vitamins in this way, we miss out on the other beneficial properties of the food that naturally contains them. Could you expand on what you mean by that?
First of all, when we focus too much on vitamins we lose sight of the fact that there are other things in food to begin with. If you look at a breakfast cereal, for example, you'll see that it's supposedly 100 percent of your RDA of these 13 chemicals and a bunch of minerals and you think, okay, my bases are covered and it's fine for me to eat whatever else I want. That does not take into account the fact that your cereal may actually have had a lot more stuff in it before it was refined and turned into cereal, and we don't understand what the potential benefits are of those other things in the wheat. So that's one thing.
There are a lot of chemicals that are now being investigated for potential health benefits. That's why you see so many headlines about resveratrol in red wine and things like that. The other thing I find particularly fascinating is the idea of how things can work differently in combination than they do when they're isolated. I mention in the book about broccoli, where giving people the particular chemical in broccoli did not work as well as when it was given to people as broccoli florets. My hypothesis is that there's some kind of enzyme or other substance in the whole broccoli that helps with the absorption and activation of this chemical, and you don't get it if you just put it in the pill.
Much like the way you don't know how a crowd of people is going to act compared to the individual people as you encounter them on their own, we just don't know how, exactly, dietary compounds are going to react in our bodies together versus when they're isolated and put into pills. It's an interesting cautionary thing to keep in mind, especially as the food industry and the supplement industry are putting out more of these food extracts and trying to take compounds that are in fruits and vegetables and put them in a pill. We just just keep in mind that that transformation doesn't always work.[/size]
