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Would anyone encourage or discourage these vitamins?


Brett
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I think they are probably OK to take just for a little assurance that you are getting all the vitamins that you need. Take with food, so the body's enzymes breaks it down with the food nutrients and can absorb the nutrients where needed. The only thing that I would be careful with is the iron. I eat so many iron-rich foods that I don't need to take in extra iron (even if I am a female). I took one with iron one time, and my stools became black and nasty (scared me!). So just check out your stools when taking it perhaps.

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Yeah...if I take anything with over 20% iron in it I feel like total crap. I never thought about having too much iron and I wanted to see how it would make me feel on my bike to take a bit extra and it was a bad idea(these had 150% of your BS daily value). Anyway I felt terrible and even worse the next day. So bad that I was forced to cut my training ride in less than half...so I tried taking half a pill and I only felt 10% better...I'm never taking iron pills again and the multis I buy from now on will have low or no iron...and honestly I don't think I really eat that much iron rich food...I have my share of greens but it doesn't seem like it would be enough in terms of iron but it does the trick

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I think they are probably OK to take just for a little assurance that you are getting all the vitamins that you need. Take with food, so the body's enzymes breaks it down with the food nutrients and can absorb the nutrients where needed. The only thing that I would be careful with is the iron. I eat so many iron-rich foods that I don't need to take in extra iron (even if I am a female). I took one with iron one time, and my stools became black and nasty (scared me!). So just check out your stools when taking it perhaps.

 

I'm a pretty lazy vegan though. Do you think I'll be fine?

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I think they are probably OK to take just for a little assurance that you are getting all the vitamins that you need. Take with food, so the body's enzymes breaks it down with the food nutrients and can absorb the nutrients where needed. The only thing that I would be careful with is the iron. I eat so many iron-rich foods that I don't need to take in extra iron (even if I am a female). I took one with iron one time, and my stools became black and nasty (scared me!). So just check out your stools when taking it perhaps.

 

I'm a pretty lazy vegan though. Do you think I'll be fine?

ummm...... too lazy to check your stool?? j/k

 

 

you might try VegLife's vegan one multi. i think it's iron-free.

 

http://veganessentials.com/catalog/multi-veg-vitamin-and-mineral-complex-by-veglife.htm

 

 

if you scroll down that page, there are lots of different vegan multis there.

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IYO, what is a lazy vegan?

 

Lazy in the sense that my diet is really weak. I only eat two main half ass meals a day with little snacks here and there. I'm probably getting nowhere near the amount of vitamins and nutrients my body needs to maintain a healthy diet. I'm going to post another thread on this soon because I'm trying to make new friends who can help me organize myself a little more as far as buying things on a low budget and eating better.

 

That's why it seems like I should just go with the vitamins with the iron. I'm probably iron deficient.

 

I have no knowledge of vitamins though. I'm not sure which ones would be best.

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Re: Guys and Iron -

Be careful if you're a guy and you supplement iron at all. The body doesn't have a mechanism to get rid of excess iron the way it does other nutrients. Women lose iron through menstruation, but in guys it can accumulate and be harmful. Just FYI.

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I agree with Trev. Getting your nutrients from food is highly superior to pill supplementation.

 

More Harm than Good?

 

Also if you take a once daily multivitamin, it may claim to have a sufficient or high percentage of each nutrient, but some are fat soluable (excess is stored in the liver) and some are water soluable (not stored, excess is dissolved and eliminated). If you take the vitamin in the morning, the water soluable nutrients are eliminated early in the day and without a proper diet or more supplementation throughout the day your body is left without those nutrients for most of the day. As an example of a fat soluable vitamin, vitamin A can be very harmful if you store too much, and you can get too much easily from excess vitamin supplements, but you really can't get too much vitamin a from food because when it comes from food like vegetables it starts as beta-carotene that is converted to vitamin A by your body, the unneeded amount is discarded by the body not stored like Vitamin A from pills is.

 

Although this means breaking a little free of the "lazy vegan" thing, it would be worth it to focus more on a healthy diet rather than supplementing the deficiencies (imo)

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I agree with Trev. Getting your nutrients from food is highly superior to pill supplementation.

 

More Harm than Good?

 

Also if you take a once daily multivitamin, it may claim to have a sufficient or high percentage of each nutrient, but some are fat soluable (excess is stored in the liver) and some are water soluable (not stored, excess is dissolved and eliminated). If you take the vitamin in the morning, the water soluable nutrients are eliminated early in the day and without a proper diet or more supplementation throughout the day your body is left without those nutrients for most of the day. As an example of a fat soluable vitamin, vitamin A can be very harmful if you store too much, and you can get too much easily from excess vitamin supplements, but you really can't get too much vitamin a from food because when it comes from food like vegetables it starts as beta-carotene that is converted to vitamin A by your body, the unneeded amount is discarded by the body not stored like Vitamin A from pills is.

 

Although this means breaking a little free of the "lazy vegan" thing, it would be worth it to focus more on a healthy diet rather than supplementing the deficiencies (imo)

 

It is VERY important to get a vitamin that is USP certified or independent lab certified, as explained by the article linked above. Sadly, the ones that aren't certified aren't always what they say they are, and sometimes are dangerous - something I think is a travesty.

About vitamin A, the vitamin label will tell you the percentage of 'preformed' vit A and beta carotene. Most are about 50% beta carotene. As long as you are not doubling up on vitamins, and definitely as a vegan since you don't get it from the diet, vit A toxicity shouldn't be an issue. Even in meat eaters it's not common. The population where it appears most often actually is your native Alaskans, that eat only meat pretty much year round, and eat the whole animal - including the liver, where A is stored.

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the vitamin label will tell you the percentage of 'preformed' vit A and beta carotene. Most are about 50% beta carotene.

 

The information I got was from a conversation with a pharmacist I work with, she was warning me about taking multivitamins and getting too much vitamin A (she didn't say toxicity but just that it is dangerous for the heart and hard on the bones to get too much).. That's interesting about the 50% beta-carotene. I never really looked into the source of the vitamin, but with that I would think that a vegan vitamin would have to be 100% beta-carotene? It appears that the preformed is all animal sources?

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I never really looked into the source of the vitamin, but with that I would think that a vegan vitamin would have to be 100% beta-carotene? It appears that the preformed is all animal sources?

i *think* it can be synthesized, but to be honest I'm not sure.

The vitamin I take is 100% beta carotene. Beta carotene is only converted to A at a 1/6 efficiency rate, (which is why vit A is also listed as RAE - retinol activity equivalents) so usually it's a mix...my husband take a men's formula that is only 13% beta carotene, and that is actually the reason I'm going to switch him to something else - he doesn't need that much preformed A. "Toxicity" refers to the point at which negative effects are seen....including what you've described. Too much vit A is indeed bad, it's just that most people don't really need to worry about it. Just don't take lots of vitamin A (not beta carotene) and don't eat lots of liver.

Take home message: look carefully at your vitamin labels!

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To me...assuming you could absorb everything...I'd rather vitamin companies lie about what percentage of what is in their pills...who needs 1500% or more of anything

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To me...assuming you could absorb everything...I'd rather vitamin companies lie about what percentage of what is in their pills...who needs 1500% or more of anything

 

The problem is actually that things like lead show up....

 

And yeah, the mega-doses at one time make for some expensive pee.

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  • 4 months later...

I used to take NOW ADAM vcaps. It is probably one of the best choices. But I am now taking only methylcobalamin weekly and daily D2. I get about 2-3 kg of f+v daily so I really don't need all that extra stuff from a multi.

 

The good thing about NOW ADAM is that it comes in a capsule. You can open the capsule and use only a fraction of it if you want to be safer. Just 1/10 of it will give you more than enough B12 for a day. Or if that is impossible to gauge, you can take 1/2 of 1 every three days or so.

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