> One reason to take the latter is to make sure you don't get a deficiency disease.
Eating a balanced diet every day gets you way more vitamins than your body can absorb. I learnt this from a biologist who studied digestion about 18 years ago. According to him vitamin pills were completely unnecessary.
I have never heard of people getting a deficiency disease with a balanced diet (say, a typical Mediterranean diet). So it's probably a combination of marketing and quick-fixes (The real message behind the pill is ... "Want to sit on your couch and eat pizza every day? No problem, just pop-in a pill!")
"Deficiency disease" in this context and Vitamin D means rickets.
And in addition to a one-a-day multivitamin multimineral tablet (split in two, each half in a different meal to improve absorption), I separately take 5,000 IU spread across all my meals, which has got my blood levels up to what they apparently should be. That's all the vitamin and mineral supplementation I take.
Eating a balanced diet every day gets you way more vitamins than your body can absorb. I learnt this from a biologist who studied digestion about 18 years ago. According to him vitamin pills were completely unnecessary.
I have never heard of people getting a deficiency disease with a balanced diet (say, a typical Mediterranean diet). So it's probably a combination of marketing and quick-fixes (The real message behind the pill is ... "Want to sit on your couch and eat pizza every day? No problem, just pop-in a pill!")