Re: funniest article!

[der Mouse <mouse () rodents-montreal org>]

> No, all vitamins are snake oil.

I wouldn't go that far.  Vitamin supplements, perhaps, in most cases,
but not vitamins themselves; they are essential, and have to come from
somewhere.

> Scientific research has proven that vitamins do not make you
> healthier, at least in places like the United States where people get
> far too many nutrients, rather than not enough.

And this is the key: unless your diet is severely skewed for some
reason, you do not have to worry about vitamins.

But that's an important "unless".  Calling vitamin supplements - or,
worse, vitamins themselves - "snake oil" is going too far.

Full-on vegans, for example, have to walk a fairly careful diet line to
avoid coming down with deficiency diseases; they aren't all
vitamin-related (protien amino-acid balance is another important aspect
that comes to mind), but some of them are.  Scurvy was once a real
issue, and still is in certain cases (moderately rare but common enough
to be worth thinking about).  And, near the end of her life, my mother
developed food allergies taking out a large enough swath of her diet
that she needed supplements of at least a few members of the B vitamin
complex.

Any of these would be (would have been, in the last case - she's long
dead, now) severely disserved by "all vitamins are snake oil".

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