The latest Nutrition Action bulletin has a cover story on multi-vitamins that seems to blow the lid off of any claims of benefit from health-wise pill-popping.
Study after study seems to show that there is no increase in life expectancy, decrease in heart disease, and so on down the list of hoped for positive results.
At first blush this is cause for nonplussed surprise. Surely there's a flaw in these studies, we think to ourselves. And yet the data seem overwhelming.
My take? I remember reading about an Indian mystic who claimed that he didn't eat or drink for weeks at a time. Meditation was all it took. And when scientists rigged up a controlled experiment where the fellow was confined to a bed and watched night and day, sure enough, he apparently didn't have anyone sneaking him snacks on the sly; his body just kept on keeping on. Could this then be our default mode? If we barely engage with the outside world; that is, slow breathing, mental discipline, and so forth, perhaps we need very little sustenance.
If so, then it would follow that those who live mainly sedentary lives require relatively little nutrition. And modern humans do live lives of relative comfort.
The question I have, though, is if this is all true, might the inverse also apply? Might those of us who exert ourselves over the course of a typical day, performing manual labor, might we not benefit greatly from a multi-vitamin every day or so? It would be interesting to know the details of the studies in question. When vitamins and placebos were administered, was there a screen for levels of exertion? And if so, was there a pattern?
And finally, what multi-vitamin were being used? Were they organic or synthetic? The article does mention that organic sources (actual fruits and vegetables, as opposed to chemical isolates) don't seem to make a difference. But one would need to know all the details to be sure of that conclusion, because a desk jockey in an office wouldn't likely benefit from either. There might be a difference, however, if manual labor were involved.
...Or, we could all just make our meals out of delicious, freshly-picked produce and that would be that.
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