I somehow always thought that the benefits of vitaminsobvious. What all people know is that without A it is impossible to see in the dark, without vitamin D there will be no normal bone growth, without folic acid, thymidine (a constituent part of DNA) will not be formed, and so on. But I was justly reminded that not all people know such particulars. That for most people the statement “vitamins are useful” is a mythologeme that can or may not be taken on faith. Well, this is generally the main problem of modern knowledge. Such a huge amount of data has been accumulated that no one can devote his life to experimental verification of everything, and the only thing he can do is agree or disagree with the sources. It just seems to me that in those cases when it comes to your own health, finding yourself a good source and agreeing with it is quite important. If a person does not believe in Rutherford's model of the atom, this will not interfere with his life. If a person does not believe in the benefits of vitamins, this can hinder him in life. In the end, no one bothers a person to experiment: get a rat and feed it poor, vitamin-free food, and see how well it will feel. But after all, there is no time to do stupid things, yes. I would like to talk about the misconceptions I have encountered on the topic of vitamins. 1) If you eat well, you don’t need artificial vitamins. Actually, yes. It is possible to get enough vitamins from food. But all the same, you have to be a little maniac in the noble matter of drawing up a full-fledged menu, you have to go everywhere with a calculator and tables of vitamin content. Make allowance for their destruction during heat treatment, storage and cleaning of products. And there are quite a few.
- Vitamin C needs 75 mg per day (this is if a person does not smoke) - 150 g of oranges or 50 g of black currant are enough for this. Or 800 grams of apples.
- Vitamin B1 (thiamine) - 1.4 mg. This is 200 grams of pork. Or 300 grams of buckwheat.
- Vitamin B2 (riboflavin) - 1.1 mg. This is one and a half eggs or 200 g of cheese.
I didn’t name another ten vitamins becauseI'm too lazy to count on. But for them, too, you need to eat 200 g each of something. 2) natural vitamins are better than artificial ones. The French scientist-chemist J. Prust in 1808 first formulated the law of consistency in composition. He wrote: “From one pole of the Earth to another compound have the same composition and the same properties. There is no difference between iron oxide from the southern hemisphere and the northern one. Malachite from Siberia has the same composition as malachite from Spain. There is only one cinnabar in the whole world. ” Vitamin synthesized in vitro is no worse and no better than vitamin synthesized in the plant. It is absolutely the same. There is a meme “vitamins from natural products are better absorbed,” but I found no noteworthy evidence of this opinion. If you have links to relevant studies, I will read with gratitude. 3) Our ancestors lived and nothing. Our ancestors, first, ate more when they had such an opportunity - simply because they moved more. And secondly, our ancestors lived much less and much worse. And in long voyages we had scurvy, yes. 4) the danger of overdose is worse than the danger of vitamin deficiency. Both are worse. The question is what is more likely. One can speak of an overdose only in relation to fat-soluble vitamins (A, D, E, K) - they are stored in the body (in the liver and adipose tissue). Water-soluble substances are derived from it. Overdosing for each of the fat-soluble vitamins is 10-100 times more than the daily requirement. If the package of the vitamin complex says “satisfies the daily need for vitamin A”, and a person eats ten tablets a day instead of one - you can congratulate him, he will have an overdose. But if he eats one tablet per day, and besides this he still had the imprudence to eat a carrot and a piece of beef liver - yes, he would get more vitamin A than he needed, but there would be no disaster in that. Only pregnant women should be afraid of an overdose of fat-soluble vitamins, since there is evidence of the teratogenic effect of large doses of vitamins A and D. There are vitamin complexes all the time — not necessarily, because even a lack of vitamins does not immediately affect, , only in cases when a person also eats very badly. Nevertheless, there are no vitamin complexes at all, even when it is winter and there is no fresh fruit, even when the person is vegetarian, even when the person smokes, even when the person gives up the session, even when the person is actively growing, even when he is undergoing acclimation (acclimation is what is commonly called acclimatization; I recently learned from an environmental lecturer that the word acclimatization should be applied only to groups of organisms and not to individuals) - well, if in all these cases a person neglects vitamin complexes, then scurvy or beri and he himself, of course, is not likely to end up being, but of weakness, fatigue, and depression, poor skin and hair, and slow healing of wounds if not complain - he is guilty.
