Dietary Supplements: vitamins, minerals, hormones etc.

20221225

I am unable to wrench myself free from the multilevel marketing tar baby. It has an upside. I have been forced to learn more than I thought I wanted to know about vitamins, minerals and hormones sold in dietary supplements.

This is a field in which I had little interest or expertise prior to Covid. Since the wise men of the Covid era (i.e., not the government, not the pharmaceutical companies, not doctors and hospitals) were advocating vitamins, zinc and ivermectin as a prophylactic, I started taking them in early 2020. I have noticed that since then I have not gotten sick as much. Quite specifically, I used to get strep throat twice a year. So often that I kept a package of doxycycline in the medicine cabinet so I could head it off the moment it was clear that I had an infection. The most recent package has thankfully gotten quite dusty.

Oksana’s father, living with us, has a number of chronic conditions. I had advocated that he and Grandma take the prophylactic regime along with me. They gratefully accepted the pills but let them sit on the shelf.

Since Oksana fell in with this multilevel marketing organization she has been forcing vitamins on everybody.  I don’t observe much change. Zoriana’s present cough is going away after two weeks, just about the usual run. Despite claims to the contrary, my stomach problem hasn’t gotten any better. I haven’t had stomach problems since I stopped drinking coffee and Coca-Cola about six months ago. Same with Eddie’s nervous stomach. He hasn’t had problems for a couple of months now, and in any case we know of no theoretical connection between vitamins and tummyaches. It is true that Grandpa’s diarrhea cleared up, but nobody has presented a theoretical link between taking vitamins and diarrhea suddenly going away.

At any rate, facing a thousand-dollar hit for supposedly magical medications, I felt compelled to do a little research on dietary supplements. Here is what I found. I am absolutely certain that many of you, perhaps most of you, have been more interested in the subject for longer than I. Please let me know in your comments.

Vitamins

Vitamins are simple organic chemicals. Specifically:

Vitamin C - C6H8O6
Vitamin A – C36H60O2
Vitamin D3 - C54H88O2

A chemical formula doesn’t fully describe an organic compound. There are isomers – alternative physical configurations of the same elements. Chemists use diagrams such as this one for vitamin D3 to show exactly how they are put together.

Alcohol and sugar, propane and butane are similar simple organic compounds. Although they could be made in the laboratory, the cheapest and easiest way to get them is from organic products, usually plants (fossilized, in the case of petroleum) rather than animals. 

Since the chemicals are always the same, the major question in taking vitamins is whether the other stuff in the pills is good for you. The manufacturers all have the same incentive – to make them work. There aren’t any secret ingredients that help one work better than another.

Trace elements

The metals and trace elements that we need usually come in compounds. These include iron, magnesium, manganese, calcium, selenium, phosphorus, potassium among many others.

Our bodies deal with the different compounds somewhat differently. Chelates are handled somewhat different than sulfates. Once again, the chemistry is well known and no particular manufacturer has a patentable way of delivering them. It is a question of trade-offs. I am currently taking zinc picolinate.  The previous bottle of zinc I took was zinc sulfate.  Zinc glycinate is another alternative.   I didn’t research the difference – I trust that if it mattered the manufacturers would choose one or the other. They are simple enough chemicals that manufacturing cost cannot be a big consideration. Their major costs are distribution, advertising, packaging and so on.

Hormones

Some supplements also include hormones such as melatonin. From the Internet:

Melatonin is a natural product found in plants and animals. It is primarily known in animals as a hormone released by the pineal gland in the brain at night, and has long been associated with control of the sleep–wake cycle.

Just as with vitamins, melatonin has an organic chemical formula, C13H16N2O2 which is usually presented with a diagram showing its physical structure.

Our bodies usually get all the vitamins that they need from the food that we eat. The same as animals in the forest, and all of our ancestors until vitamin supplements became popular about 100 years ago.

As an aside, 100 years is a long time. If vitamin supplements made a vast difference in health, it should be visible in the Americans of today. Is it?

Given that the body of the average person acquires all of the vitamins that it needs from food, it would follow that vitamin deficiency would differ from person to person, depending on their constitution.

We know about some vitamin deficiencies. Sailors used to get a disease called scurvy from a deficiency of vitamin C. The Limies (British) addressed that by carrying limes on board. People in northern climes get a deficiency of vitamin D in the winter. Our bodies manufacture it from sunshine, and there is not enough.

There are thousands of different manufacturers of vitamin supplements. What differentiates one from another?  The first question is quality control. Do the pills contain the advertised quantity of the vitamin or mineral? Are the pills uniform?

This is the same sort of question that has arisen with regard to the Covid vaccines. Different batch lots of the jabs seem to contain quite different quantities of the ingredients listed on the label. Moreover, they frequently appear to contain ingredients that are not listed. The same question applies to dietary supplements of vitamins and minerals, though their quality control appears to be quite superior to that of Pfizer and Moderna’s injectable biological products. 

There is a question whether vitamins cure disease. In general vitamins are a preventative rather than a curative. Medicines cure, vitamins prevent.  Vitamins and minerals strengthen a person’s immune system, making it more capable of fighting off disease.

Vitamin regimes to strengthen the immune system have a long history.  Nobel prize winner Linus Pauling was advocating large doses of Vitamin C 50 years ago.  Professor Bruce Hollis has been researching the benefits of additional Vitamin D for three decades.

A number of doctors working independently, without support from, indeed, actively suppressed by the US government, developed vitamin and mineral regimes to strengthen the body to resist Covid.  These were used to great effect in India, Egypt and other countries in which the big pharmaceutical companies did not have as much influence on the measures taken to control Covid.

Since the chemical composition of any given vitamin must be the same regardless of the manufacturer, what distinguishes one manufacturer from another?

Quality control – the consistency and purity of the product  – should be a major criterion. Fortunately, however, throughout the developed world, certainly including Europe and the United States, all manufacturers adhere to certain standards established by the International Standards Organization and other such bodies.  The other factors for deciding on a provider should be ones of practicality: dosage, price, distribution, and the format and taste of the pills.

Determining your individual needs

Every person has different needs – or no need it all – when it comes to dietary supplements. The standard advice has always been to ask your doctor. The Covid episode has shown that doctors are all too often captives of the government, big pharma, hospitals and others in the medical establishment. Nonetheless, they are certainly the ones who will know best which tests you should take to find out what your needs are. Obvious ones would include:

·       Anemia, to see if iron supplements might be advisable
·       Bone density, to see if calcium supplements make sense
·       Pregnancy, to see if the standard pregnancy vitamins would be advisable
·       Lack of exposure to sunshine, which would indicate vitamin D.

I put a lot of faith in well-known doctors on the Internet, people who are not controlled by the establishment and are frequently at odds with them. These include Dr. Peter McCullough with regard to cardiac issues, Dr. Robert Malone with regard to vaccines, Dr. Andrew Wakefield also with regard to vaccines, the above-mentioned Bruce Hollis when it comes to vitamin D, and the Frontline Critical Care Consortium FLCCC when it comes to Covid. These people have no financial stake in my decision and are not obviously controlled by government or big business.

Doctors are poor at predicting drug interactions. The effect of excessive dosage has been studied when it comes to the most common vitamins and minerals such as vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin D, iron and the like. Other vitamins and minerals may not have been subjected to rigorous analysis.

Here is a list of the ingredients in the premium priced supplements offered by one multilevel marketing company. It is certain that no consumer will be able to understand the need for all of these, much less be able to assess appropriate dosages. It is highly unlikely that any doctor could do so either. The customer has to simply trust that the recommended daily allowance (RDA) established by government bodies it is not excessive – won’t poison them. On the other hand, it is equally certain that most of them are not necessary.

Given that it would be impossible for a consumer to understand the need for many of the items on this list, the best bet for the super cautious would be to decide based on price to buy multivitamin and mineral supplements that contain most of them.

Researching the supplements

The Internet is without a doubt the best place to research a decision. Depending on your scientific and medical background and the amount of time you have to spend, you can find just about everything you need to know on the Internet.

A vitamin seller who supports a number of different brands will be able to compare the advantages and disadvantages of one brand over another. Since he is in the business of selling vitamins, he will of course be biased toward selling you something rather than telling you you don’t need it.

The multilevel marketing organization represents only a single source of vitamins. They obviously have a bias in favor of their own solution. More than that, they have a secondary agenda, which is to convert you into a true believer, recruit you to sell the product and make upstream profits from your sales and your ability to recruit other people beneath you.

Selecting a supplier

The consumer will decide where to buy dietary supplements based on price, convenience, trust and informational support. The obvious choices would be a drugstore, a vitamin store, an online vitamin seller, and a multilevel marketing organization. This is my assessment of the alternatives:

Last week I ran out of zinc and melatonin.  I made a special side trip to the vitamin seller in the Kids World at Darnitsa whom Eddie and I had visited a couple of months ago. I liked his broad knowledge of his products in the fact that he seemed to be steering us to the least pricey alternatives among the brands he carried.  I spent $15 with him. The chances are that I could have got the same stuff for a dollar or two less over the Internet. I consider the conversation to be worth that extra dollar.

That’s the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the strong man has snuck away for an hour on Christmas day to write this, the kids are watching movies, drawing and doing other stuff, and tomorrow Zoriana will go back to nursery school leaving the good-looking woman and me a little time to ourselves.

Graham