The British government recommends everyone take vitamin D during winter, and to consider it all year round if you have dark skin.

Running the numbers, the difference in cost of taking a multivitamin all year versus taking just vitamin D works out around the price of a pint of beer.

So I might as well take the multivitamin. How do I know I'm getting enough molybdenum (whatever that does)?

The trouble is that supermarket multivitamins don’t contain the amount of Vit D required to make up for lack of sunlight in the UK; you need a high-strength D tablet in addition to the D in your multivitamin

(The UK govt recommends a 100IU supplement of Vit D per day and this is what most multivitamins provide, but current understanding is that an adult needs 1000-2000IU total per day, which is hard to achieve from sunlight and food in the UK)

Quite right. I recently started taking multivitamins, and was told by the doctor I need to take 800IU per-day (based on my blood levels) of Vitamin D (I have "Olive" skin), the multivitamin provides only half of that (400IU/10uG).

You shouldn't double up on the multivitamin or you'll be overdosing on other vitamins it contains, so an additional Vit D is required.

> The UK govt recommends a 100IU supplement [...] current understanding is that an adult needs 1000-2000IU

The NHS recommends you consider taking 400IU, and not more than 4,000IU: https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/vitamins-and-minerals/vitamin-...

(That page also says 400IU is what adults need, do you have a source for your 'current understanding' by any chance?

> So I might as well take the multivitamin

It is possible to overdose on vitamins, and you can get adverse effects. It‘s not really a good idea to indiscriminately ”just take everything every day“.

Depends on the vitamin. It's difficult to overdose on Vitamin C for example. Vitamin D should be dosed with caution, but taking e. g. 1000 IU a day should be safe even if you get it from other sources.

That's true, but you have to do some really silly things to get to that point. You're not going to overdose on a multivitamin from the supermarket.

overdosing on Vitamin D is not really a thing

Hypercalcæmia?

Actually, it is possible to overdose on vitamin D, though it’s relatively rare. Vitamin D toxicity, also known as hypervitaminosis D, occurs when there is an excessive amount of vitamin D in the body. This can happen through very high doses of supplements over an extended period or by accidental ingestion of high-dose vitamin D supplements.

everything including water can be toxic at high doses. when I say its not really a thing, it means that it is indeed very uncommon compared to the amount of people who take supplements.

Ok, so paracetamol (aka Tylenol, acetaminophen) overdose is also 'not really a thing', because despite it being absolutely possible to trash your liver and die, the number of people who do that (including as a suicide attempt, as does happen) is miniscule compared to the approximately everybody who takes it.

The safety margin for Vitamin D is on a totally different scale vs the safety margin of Paracetamol (which is very thin, it's easy to overdose on it). bad analogies are bad.

Unfortunately, this is quite common among parents who want to make their own infant formula. They don't know how to dose milligrams and give ten or a hundred times the prescribed dose to infants.

https://www.anses.fr/en/content/vitamin-d-opt-medicines-avoi...

The blood test for vitamin D my doctor showed me includes a safe range.

If it were, why wouldn't it promote longevity

You hold the implicit assumption that for something to be efficacious it must correlate with longevity. But it is possible for something to increase your day-to-day experience and quality of life without a meaningful affect on how long you live.

A good example might be Crohn's disease: not having Crohn's disease barely affects your life expectancy, but your quality of life is vastly improved.

People that feel their health getting worse might try to compensate with multivitamines?

Also, the degenerate case of having a bad vitamine defficiency and also not taking vitamine pills might be too rare to show in the statistics.

I mean about a third of the subjects take pills. How many does not take pills and would benefit greatly from it? Only those would move the needle.

isn't the US full of unhealthy food that is "fortified with vitamins" to distract from the fact that it is unhealthy?

All flour in the western world is fortified with vitamins, which is mandated by governements. This then filters through the entire food chain so pretty much any thing you eat has fortified ingredients in.

There is nothing bad about it, it is there to replace the natural vitamins and minerals removed in the milling process.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_fortification#United_King...

> All flour in the western world is fortified with vitamins

All white/highly milled flour; there is no requirement for wholemeal flour to be fortified as nothing is being lost.

I found this out recently from the place I buy my wholemeal bread flour as they had a notice about the requirement, and that it doesn't apply to the wholemeal varieties they sell.

Like what exactly?

Like all kinds of industrial produced crap that it's better to not consume, with a health-washing badge about how they "contain vitamins" - from corn-flakes and energy drinks to "wonder bread", "Mentos gum with vitamins" and others.

Flour is produced industrially (and pre-industrially, in any case, it's heavily processed). Do you include that in your 'industrially produced crap'?

Flour is not that good for your diet to begin with, regardless of being produced industrially or not. The kind of crap supermarket breads popular in the US, doubly so.

But, to answer you question no, I make the common sense distinction, between food stuff produced at industrial scale, and "industrial produced crap", like things that involve preservatives, food additives, sweeteners, artificial coloring, hefty does of corn syrup, lab chemicals, and other such crap, which can range from the plain shitty ("wonder bread") to the spectaturaly shitty (sodas, gum, doritos, skittles, and on and on).

In other words, I don't fall for thought-stopping arguments like "Ackchyually, just so you know, water is a chemical too, so what's so bad with industrial food-stuff designed in a food chemistry lab vs grass-fed meat, fish, veggies, and fruits?"

Well, I have to say that German supermarket bread stacks up pretty well against so-called artisanal bread in many other parts of the world, and definitely against their industrial bread. (That's purely a judgement of taste and texture. I'm not making any health claims here.)

The German supermarket bread is obviously produced on an industrial scale to keep the costs down, but given the preferences of German consumers, the bread still gets enough time to ferment and there's no sugars nor shortening added. (One of our my goals here in Singapore is, funny enough, to recreate a 'normal' German bread, a so called Mischbrot, in my home kitchen.)

So it's not so much that industrial is bad, as that certain types of processing and ingredients are probably bad. I agree that especially corn syrup seems very suspicious, whether lovingly hand crafted or industrially produced.

>The German supermarket bread is obviously produced on an industrial scale to keep the costs down, but given the preferences of German consumers, the bread still gets enough time to ferment and there's no sugars nor shortening added

Yes, hence the distinction I made [between food stuff produced at industrial scale, and "industrial produced crap"]

OK, then we are mostly on the same page.

It's a bit sad, but many systems _do_ give people mostly what they want, be that for consumer goods or in politics. Even if it's not necessarily what they, in polite society, would admit to wanting.

Unfortunately a vast section of the population are are classed poor or in poverty, and so cant afford anything better than wonder bread. This is why fortified foods were introduced in the first place.

Its not a conspiracy to make you think that chemically created foods are as good as naturally produced unprocessed foods, its so that people who cant afford or dont have access to healthy natural food dont get deseases like rickets, spinal conditions, or other growth mutations which are common from malnutrition.

I feel like your argument has its heart in the right place, but is incredibly uninformed.

> Unfortunately a vast section of the population are are classed poor or in poverty, and so cant afford anything better than wonder bread. This is why fortified foods were introduced in the first place.

Supermarket bread in Germany is very cheap, and looks a lot less suspicious than 'Wonderbread'. (Never having had Wonderbread, I can't tell anything more past the looks.) I don't the poverty argument: the US is a lot richer than Germany.

German supermarkets like Aldi and Lidl aren't charities: obviously they also use industrial processes to make bread really cheap and turn a profit. But given consumer preferences in Germany, you get something that looks like this https://www.aldi-nord.de/produkt/krustenbrot-7256-0-0.articl...

It's 1.49 Euro for 1kg of bread.

I can believe that this style of bread would be a lot more expensive in the US. It certainly is where I am living now in South East Asia. But that's not because of poverty, but because without widespread demand for 'real' bread you don't have the scale necessary for industrial production to make sense.

(And it's not like stuff like Wonderbread is illegal in Germany. You can buy fluffy white bread just fine, too, if you really want it.)

>Unfortunately a vast section of the population are are classed poor or in poverty, and so cant afford anything better than wonder bread.

I don't think that's the case. Both because poor people, in countries with lower wages and higher cost of living, still buy regular bread, and also because in the US that shit is also consumed by not-so-poor and middle class families too.

>Its not a conspiracy to make you think that chemically created foods are as good as naturally produced unprocessed foods, its so that people who cant afford or dont have access to healthy natural food dont get deseases like rickets, spinal conditions, or other growth mutations which are common from malnutrition.

I doubt this as well, since the "with vitamins" badges are also on food that's way beyond necessary spending, from gum to expensive "high end" "healthy" cereal, all the way to power drinks that cost as much as a Starbucks latte.

I'm not talking about official state sponsored/mandated programs to add some beneficial substances to food stuff for the general population (which of course is good).

> I doubt this as well, since the "with vitamins" badges are also on food that's way beyond necessary spending, from gum to expensive cereal, all the way to power drinks that cost as much as a Starbucks latte.

Well, I guess that's just basic marketing? Vitamins are approximately free to add, and some people are more likely to buy stuff that makes vitamin health claims, while approximately no one dislikes vitamins enough to stop buying a product because of vitamins in it.

Vitamin Water.

Perhaps the sample group didn't have a deficiency to start with.

Yeah, that makes the most sense. Take supplements if and when you need it. I think the real study would be if someone did trended vitamin deficiency data from all the subjects and then co-related the intake (for deficient persons) with health outcomes.