Photo credit: Daniel R. Blume. Courtesy Flicker Creative Commons.
We need vitamins. Without 13 or so essential chemicals found naturally in certain foods, you'll get very sick and maybe die. So should you make sure to have your medicine cabinet stocked with supplements? Maybe not.
Journalist Catherine Price tells Steve Fast that scientists know that vitamins make a big difference in our health, but much about the relationship between vitamins and health still a mystery.
“We don’t really know what vitamins do in our bodies,” Price says. “They have more purposes than just preventing deficiencies.”
Often marketing has more to do with the public perception of the need of vitamins for a healthy lifestyle. This might be a surprise to many who look carefully at the claims found on food labels.
Price says that the Recommended Dietary Allowances (RDAs) often cited in advertising and seen on food labels are based on old research.
“The basis that they use to do those percentages of the daily values are not based on the most up to date recommendations from the Institute of Medicine,” Price says. ”They’re actually based on the recommendations from 1968.”
In her book “Vitamania: Our Obsessive Quest for Nutritional Perfection,” Catherine Price recounts the history of nutritional research and the cultural life of vitamin additives. The author highlights the 1994, called the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act as guiding the regulation, and lack thereof, of supplements.
Listen to the interview: Catherine Price on The Steve Fast Show
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