For some time now, it is common to see hundreds of products enriched with vitamins and minerals in supermarkets.
Vitamins are essential for life, however, they are currently given the role of health enhancer and many moms tend to choose milk with more vitamins, more enriched yogurt or cereals with more letters (A, B1, B2 , B6, D, E, etc.) and even to buy multivitamin complexes when the reality is that all vitamins are in food.
Giving extra vitamins to a child would not be questionable if an excess of them were healthy or had no effect, the drawback is that giving the body more vitamins than it needs can be counterproductive.
But don't they say vitamins are very important?
Of course they are, formerly there were diseases caused by the lack of them especially in disadvantaged population groups without access to a healthy diet.
Simplistic logic says that if the lack of vitamins makes us sick, their presence or consumption heals us. It has even managed to make the population believe that more vitamins, more health, making healthy people without deficiencies consume them.
In other words, it is a true triumph of pharmaceutical multinationals, which have made healthy people use drugs.
To get an idea of the money that the vitamin industry moves: it is estimated that only in the United States generates a profit of 22,000 million dollars a year.
Such a business needs to rely on information that makes us believe in its benefits, so little by little new benefits have been added to its consumption: that prevent diseases, that help us cure us of infections, that give us back our energy or take us away. fatigue, which improve our eyesight ...
And it is not true?
As I said, what hurts health is lack of them, but as all vitamins are in food and today we can have all of them, both children and adults can live perfectly healthy without taking supplemental vitamins.
To exemplify the effect of vitamins in our well-fed body (balanced diet) imagine that we have, as in video games, a health bar that is filled as we take vitamins. At the time it is full, taking more vitamins does not cause the bar to fill more or increase its ability to accommodate more health. Come on, they don't do anything.
And can they become bad?
Well, I'm afraid that some studies that are being done about it are documenting not only that they don't bring benefits, but that In people who take high doses of vitamins, health complications occur.
In the case of vitamin A, for example, it has been seen that an excess affects the organs that metabolize it (eyes, bones and liver). Carrots are good for the eyes, they say, because they carry vitamin A, but an excess of this vitamin can produce blurred vision in the long term.
