Most people who grew up in the 90’s probably took vitamins at some point in their life. It used to be a pretty common occurrence for a mother to give her children a multi vitamin every day at breakfast time. It was probably a Flintstones chewable or some other chalky cartoon character vitamin. And as you became an adult, you probably got into the habit of taking more and more multivitamins that were bigger and less chewable (some of those multivitamins can be an actual choking hazard).
Why Multi Vitamins?
The theory behind why we take multivitamins is pretty simple: our diets don’t always cover all of our nutritional bases, so we take vitamins to supplement the missing nutrition. In theory this is pretty sound; it can be difficult to stick to a diet that perfectly gives you all the adequate nutrition you need. But supplementing missing nutrients really isn’t the way to go. Your diet should be designed to more or less give you all of the nutrients you need. Taking vitamin supplements when you don’t have a definite vitamin deficiency can often do more harm than good.
Multivitamins are designed to contain 100% of your recommended daily vitamins. Since you are definitely getting at least some of those nutrients in adequate amounts in your daily diet, that means you are definitely over dosing on vitamins. Taking more than your recommended daily intake of vitamins can lead to serious health issues over time, including the development of cancer. Studies have also shown that too many vitamins can severely decrease your mortality rate.
Basically, too much of a good thing can and will kill you. The best thing to do is to design your meals to be nutritious and give you all the nutrients you need
