Dr. Christopher Labos

I'm like, well, there is a downside.

They cost money, and I don't have money to burn.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I would rather not waste my money on stuff that doesn't actually work.

Well, here's the thing.

No child in North America is going to get rickets unless they are truly malnourished.

But then the solution to malnourishment does not give children vitamin.

It's give them proper food so that they are well fed on a daily basis.

You will not gain anything

Once you are no longer deficient in vitamin C, vitamin D, if you are truly vitamin C deficient, you are going to get scurvy.

And unless you're an 18th century British sailor, you're not going to get scurvy.

You know, if you are deficient in certain B vitamins, you'll get things like beriberi and pellagra.

And if you don't know what those diseases are, it's because you've never seen a case because they just don't exist anymore.

So this idea of, oh, if a little bit is good, more must be better, doesn't actually hold true because once your body has all the vitamins that it needs, it just excretes the rest of them in your urine.

And so the old joke is when you're buying vitamins, what you're doing is you're buying expensive urine.

That is largely true.