Your body needs vitamins in order to form complex aminos to operate. But your body only needs to make so many of them - especially if you are an adult, not pregnant, or not suffering from a disease of some sort.

The very premise that loading up your body with "excess" vitamins beyond what you need is already pretty fraught. Building a house without enough lumber can lead to long term deficiency - but loading up a construction site with more materials than are needed shouldn't automatically be assumed to be good.

The reality is that the modern diet has already solved so many common nutrient deficiency diseases (pellagra and goiters were a shockingly common diseases 100 years ago) that maxing out on vitamin intake has become more of something like a speculative hobby than anything else.

▲ torstenvl 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> loading up a construction site with more materials than are needed shouldn't automatically be assumed to be good

It is almost universally recognized as good to do exactly that. It's better to have one planned extra trip to return excess materials (if they can't be used on the next job) than to have multiple unplanned trips when you unexpectedly run out of this or that.

	▲	quickthrowman 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Definitely. I ordered material to replace the balusters on our shared family cabin with horizontal stainless steel cable deck rails and ordered 5-10% extra for all of the various fittings, cable, as well as a backup swage tool. One of my uncles asked why I’m budgeting for an extra $150 of material we won’t need. I asked him how much it would cost to get us all up here for another weekend to finish if we needed extra parts. The answer was “more than $150” and he understood. It’s even more crucial to keep enough material on the jobsite when you’re running a project and paying $140 an hour for an electrician.

▲ PaulHoule 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Most vitamins are a cofactor for enzymes like

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiamine#Biological_functions

Vitamin D is not but rather it regulates calcium and phosphorous metabolism.

▲ asdff 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There would still be a ton of goiters if not for iodized salt, basically an obligatory vitamin intake. People had no good iodine source living inland where most anything they catch or grow is not going to have sufficient iodine no matter what it is they were eating.

I'm not sure what the ancestral iodine source might have been. Fishing villages perhaps along the coast? Hard to say how much coast was relatively populated given challenges of shifting shorelines and archaeological efforts. You can still reproduce laden with a goiter however, and that is enough to keep chucking malnourished humans somewhere on earth.

	▲	OkayPhysicist 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It takes a pretty extreme iodine deficiency to end up with goiters. In most environments, there's enough in the soil that eating local plants / animals that eat those plants supplies enough. The iodine deficiency issues that haunted the Swiss (and Appalachia) arose from people settling down from nomadic lifestyles, in mountainous regions that easily were leeched of iodine by rainfall, and then farming that already leeched soil until there wasn't any iodine left at all.

▲ gblargg 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Depends on which vitamin as well. Some like vitamin B and C aren't retained, so excess is shed quickly.

▲ cute_boi 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

These days it is same with protein... Too much protein fads.

▲ throwaway2037 3 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

    > Too much protein

Is there really a scientific consensus about "too much protein"? As I understand, the bit about "stresses your kidneys" has been disproven.

▲ legitster 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think the difference is that increasing protein intake does offset other worse eating habits. So it's not that you need the protein, but there's a small probability that it replaces calories from refined carbohydrates.

▲ HerbManic 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah, you do need daily protein but for most people nowhere near as much as they are taking in.

You see these protein bars and some of them basically have a full days worth of the stuff and that is before your other meals come in.

There is the YouTube channel 'Subway takes' where people have about a minute to argue a point of view, usually very funny takes as well. There was one that was 'The Protein fad is basically an eating disorder for men', they aren't far off the mark with that.

	▲	legitster 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		>'The Protein fad is basically an eating disorder for men' This is such a bad take. The current protein fad isn't being driven by men. Bros have been hyping protein and keto for over a decade. The current "put protein in everything" fad was driven by women's social media, especially mom influencers. You're seeing the explosion in products women are more likely to shop for. My wife started buying protein products after getting a flood of Reels talking up its benefits for children and women's health.

▲ UpsideDownRide 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Vitamin D deficiency entered the chat. It's a relatively common issue in many countries.

	▲	legitster 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		That's fair, but it also exactly explains why there are weak positive effects of extra Vitamin D. There's a lot of unknowingly deficient people out there who get benefits from supplements. But the benefits are limited by the upper bound of the deficiency.
	▲	im3w1l 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Two things to consider: The recommended levels are established based on "good enough for 95% of people". That means that quite a lot of people can get by with less than the recommendation. Furthermore, being deficient is not a binary. If you are just a little bit deficient you may have very mild symptoms.