So...What' s the Deal With Vitamins?

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A lot of nutritionists or physicians will tell you that if you eat a good diet, you don' t need multivitamins and minerals because you' ll get them from your food. However the foods that we eat are themselves deprived of vitamins and minerals because of modern farming practices. The soil is not rich and plentiful in nutrients in modern farms. So we need to intake supplemental vitamins and minerals in order to make sure we have adequate levels.

Minerals are important because they are neccessary for cellular metabolism. Many minerals work with enzymes for normal biochemical processes to take place. For example, the body cannot make hemoglobin without iron (the iron atom forms the center of the hemoglobin molecule.) Minerals can' t be manufactured by the body, they come from soil- which is why you have to get them somehow.

Vitamins also are important for metabolism. The body can produce some of them on it' s own or with the help of symbiotic bacteria (some B vitamins are made in the intestine by such bacteria). Many of them cannot be manufactured and must be ingested. Additionally many of them are antioxidants and provide free-radical scavenging benefits. Free radicals are molecules that are produced by metabolic processes. They are dangerous because they' re electrically unstable and destroy other molecules (for example the ones making up a cellular membrane) in order to stabilize themselves. There are several studies that suggest this damage contributes to the aging process.

As bodybuilders and athletes we naturally expend more energy. This energy comes from our food. Since we eat more and tax our bodies more, there is more oxidative damage to our cells from metabolism. Taking vitamins may help reduce some of this damage.

As far as multivitamins go, I take them, but I acknowledge that it' s better to get as many nutrients from your food as possible. For every compound that we' ve identified as being good for you, there are dozens we haven' t yet (and those naturally won' t be in synthetic vitamins.) For example, when you take most multivitamins, you get vitamin E as alpha tocopherol. This is the essential form of tocopherol, but there are close to seventy types which have much nutritional benefit- and you usually can' t get them from synthetic vitamins, only from food. Additionally it seems when we take multivitamins in pill form we only absorb around 10 percent of most of the constituent nutrients. Some we don' t absorb at all. For example, if your multivitamin contains both calcium and iron, the calcium blocks absorption of nearly all the iron (same with vitamin E.) Calcium itself can' t be absorbed by the body without the presence of magnesium.

However they do provide a lot of benefit. So that' s why I take them.