How many of these do you believe?
Many people take their usual dose of multivitamins thinking that it somehow makes them healthier and that it prevents sickness, but rarely do you see people who know exactly what they are putting in their body. That’s why it’s so easy to cook up a myth and sell it to the masses who believe just about anything they see or read online.
In this article, we’ll discuss the different myths that have clobbered the vitamin supplement market. How many of these do you believe?
Myth #1: More is good
This is a myth that is obviously cooked up by some supplement company to boost sales. The idea that you get more benefits when you take more vitamins is an old vitamin myth that many seem to believe. You see overloaded vitamins nowadays, 1000IU, 2000IU vitamins have been making rounds for at least a decade, and that’s widely attributed to the belief that more is good. The truth is, if you’re not in any kind of deficiency, taking your recommended daily value (%DV) is enough to maintain a healthy body. That’s why the information is printed at the backside of every bottle as supplement facts to inform you about what you’re supposed to take to maintain a healthy body. You don’t need to take many pills a day. In fact, there’s a formula for men – Ultimate Man Once-A-Day, which contains every nutrient that your body needs a day with just a single pill.
Myth #2: You can’t overdose from a multivitamin
This is quite dangerous, since many believe that vitamins are ultimately safe to take. Since vitamins are not drugs, you can’t overdose from them. Sounds about right, doesn’t it? Wrong. Anything that is taken in excess is bad, including vitamins. Most multivitamins contain Iron. An overdose in iron can affect your bladder and kidneys, eyes, and your circulatory system. These are just the tip of the iceberg. Constipation, diarrhea, nausea, flushing, and many other conditions can be derived from a multivitamin overdose.
Myth #3: Your yellow pee contains wasted vitamins
While it’s true that excess vitamins can be excreted through your urine, seeing bright yellow urine when you pee doesn’t exactly mean that you’re peeing away the vitamins you just took. Your pee turns yellow for a number of reasons, and only a few of them are vitamin-related. For example, when your pee turns bright yellow, it’s due to the Vitamin B2 or Riboflavin, which is a common ingredient in multivitamins. It doesn’t mean that you’re wasting Riboflavin; it just merely affects the color of your urine, the same way eating asparagus makes your pee turn into a bright yellow color. If your pee turns into yellow or dark orange, you might be peeing away excess vitamin C, just like when you eat too many carrots.
Myth #4: Vitamins are optional
While this may be true back in the day when people had a diverse diet; now, not so much. Our diet today is pretty much limited to a few kinds of meat and a few kinds of greens, so it’s likely that we’d develop a deficiency one way or the other. Add to the fact that many are restricting their diet to lose weight, and you increase the risks of a vitamin deficiency. Now, more than ever, people need multivitamins to sustain a healthy lifestyle. Our diet is no longer enough to keep us healthy, hence – supplements.
Myth #5: Multivitamins rot your body
If you’re fond of watching viral videos, you might have come across a video which shows how fast a popular brand of multivitamins would rot after a few days of exposure in open air. An average viewer would think that this is the same thing it does to our body – false.
In fact, most medicine and supplement pill preparations have a very delicate coating that protects the contents from being broken down in the stomach, so it can be absorbed in the intestines. Almost every nutrient in the pill would oxidize quickly, and it’s normal to expect the nutrient-rich pill to attract mold and other bacteria. It doesn’t represent what would happen inside your body. In fact, multivitamins are broken down so quickly that it doesn’t even take a whole day for your body to process everything.
