Posted by:
slskipper
(
)
Date: November 19, 2023 01:17AM
I think it safe to say that most contributors to this board have a less than positive view of the dietary supplement industry. They are almost always linked to a MLM, which only adds to their anomie. I wanted to jump in and explain the truth behind vitamins and other biochemicals that promoters claim will fix everything in your life, even if nothing is wrong to begin with. My credentials include a lifetime in the chemistry and pharmaceutical industries. Please read on. It will help to set the stage for deciding if you really need to fork over your cash to your MLM "friend". I'll try to keep it brief.
Almost everything in your body is a biological jig. A jig holds a workpiece in the right configuration for some operation- and after that, the jig releases its workpiece to make room for the next one. Vitamins are components of certain jigs inside you. Your body makes most of the components you need, and assembles all the parts in the right configuration. Some components are not generated in-house and must be supplied externally. Those are vitamins. The reasons for limited in-house production vary, but most are compounds that were readily available in our diets and so it was just easier to use what was already available. We actually try to make Vitamin C, like most animals, but somewhere along the way a mutation made it so the final step doesn't work for most humans. There are actually some lineages with an intact production line all the way and so they do not get scurvy.
That's all vitamins are. They are parts of jigs, like drill press clamps or table saw rip fences. They are not magical- and that is the big secret that a great many people just cannot deal with. They need what can only be described as magic in their lives, and so they glom onto the most outlandish claims for their cherished chemicals. they even hate that word "chemical", because it totally removes any vestige of magic that they pretend resides in their smoothies and cleanses and anything else. To repeat: a vitamin fits in a specific location in a specific chemical jig and it does not fit anywhere else. You can't use a rip fence to hold an airplane strut in place for welding. Any encounter with any other biochemical is meaningless to the vitamin molecule. It just bounces off and moves on.
Here's how to tell if you are getting enough vitamins: ask yourself if you are a scurvy bilge rat. Ask yourself if you have rickets or beriberi. If you do, take vitamins. If you don't, then you are already fine and don't fix it. And yes, I know there are some individuals who do need supplemental nutrition. There are people who can help with that. We call them doctors. Note that some vitamins in excess can absolutely kill you.
A great deal of the claims for supplements came from Linus Pauling. He had a Nobel Prize for quantum chemistry, and he decided that was enough to qualify him as an expert in everything. It was his fault that we got into the anti-oxidant madness. He went ballistic promising that vitamin C- a very effective anti-oxidant in a test tube- would prevent cancer and probably social awkwardness because why not? Suddenly anti-oxidants were the key to curing everything that was wrong with you, especially if there was nothing wrong with you to start with but you just can't be happy unless you buy our products! Of course he died young, of cancer. It turns out- quelle surprise!- that your body actually needs some oxidants (free radicals) for normal operation, and it already has all the machinery it needs to maintain their levels within very tight tolerances. To repeat: your body is a factory with no need for any added magical contributions.
I know this is long. I just wanted to help everybody know what's going on.
Are you a scurvy bilge rat? Just asking.
Thank you.