Student thoughts: Vitamins may not be as beneficial as advertised
- Jul 13, 2015
- 2 min read
With such a large variety of vitamin and mineral supplements offered that claim to be beneficial, one has to wonder if they really help anything at all.
This opinion article was originally featured in PantherNOW and questions whether vitamin supplements are actually beneficial to a person's health.
Check out the article’s excerpt below and click the link if you want to read the full story!
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Maytinee Kramer/Contributing Writer
With such a large variety of vitamin and mineral supplements offered that claim to be beneficial, one has to wonder if they really help anything at all.
Derived from the word “vita,” meaning “life” in Latin, vitamins are necessary to convert food to energy. Certain vitamin deficiencies can cause diseases such as scurvy, anemia and rickets. Vitamins are essential, but the real question lies in how much people need, and whether they are getting enough of it in food.
One important thing to remember before deciding to buy bottles of everything from vitamin A to zinc is that we need to eat healthy foods. Vitamins simply can’t compensate for poor diet.
Nutrition experts argue that one’s diet is key to getting the best vitamins and minerals naturally, and that people only need the recommended daily allowance found in a routine diet. However, vitamin manufacturers argue that a regular diet would not suffice, and the higher the vitamin dosage, the better. Most people assume that vitamins are healthy and any excess can’t do any harm, but as it turns out, large quantities of supplemental vitamins can actually be quite harmful.
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Photo Credit: Jonathan Perez on Unsplash
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