Is Use of (water soluble) supplement Vitamins a waste of money?
Ideally, we all should get all the vitamins and minerals and such we need through our diet and not need supplementation. And we do, insofar as few here in America on a truly varied diet get so little of a given nutrient as to develop a clinical or “primary” deficiency. However, this said there are many people who develop what are called secondary deficiencies. These are often due to lifestyle factors such as smoking, alcohol abuse, coffee, use of certain drugs that interfere with absorption or utilization of a particular nutrient or nutrients, restrictive or lop-side diets, and even variations in how some people handle specific nutrients (Something famed nutrition scientist Dr. Roger Williams at the University of Texas-Austin called Food-bound vitamin B12 malabsorption is defined as an impaired ability to absorb food or protein-bound vitamin B12, although the free form is fully absorbable (11). In the elderly, food-bound vitamin B12 malabsorption is thought to result mainly from atroph
