Doctor, Should I Take Vitamins?

Hi, If you eat a whole food, unrefined plant based diet you will get the vitamins and minerals you need naturally. Daily supplements of vitamin B12 and perhaps vitamin D for people who spend most of their time indoors is all you need to take. According to Dr.T.Colin Campbell this is the diet science has found to be consistent with the greatest health and lowest incidence of many of the "Western" diseases as cancer, heart disease, obesity and diabetics. I will highly recommend reading the China Study written by Dr. Campbell for all that is interested in own health. Hippocrates: "Let your food be medicine and your medicine be food". Happy Natural Life Kristin Jensen "be yourself and be happy - never stop dreaming!"

This article has some sensible advice, but a lot of data the medical community has to offer is pretty bad. To gain the best advantage of vitamins and supplements, you need good data, both from your doctor, and from studies.  This requires a good doctor with an open mind, and not one that steers you away just because they don't get to write a script for something. There are a lot of them. I spent some time looking at medical studies, and read the abstracts to see the approach and conclusions. Most of them are just terrible. Whenever I see weak language like "is associated with," I stop and look elsewhere.  If I am interested in vitamin D for a certain reason, what good is a lot of "is associated with lower risk of ......?" I want to know if it is going to help for a certain reason, not because of some maybe, kind of, this test group had less of this or more of that.  These kinds of studies are good at looking at a few details, but not the big picture. I think the overall message above is use caution and don't just go out and buy everything based on marketing, which is good. If you want to pick some vitamins and supplements, know why you are picking them, and know how to measure their effectiveness. This just about always requires a good doctor. The studies I have seen are not very useful at all. I take quite a few, but my doctor picks them and does regular blood tests to measure how they are working, so I think I am lucky. I learned a lot from this doctor. When I scan the literature on the things I am taking I don't see the specifics I am looking for.