The British government recommends everyone take vitamin D during winter, and to consider it all year round if you have dark skin.
Running the numbers, the difference in cost of taking a multivitamin all year versus taking just vitamin D works out around the price of a pint of beer.
So I might as well take the multivitamin. How do I know I'm getting enough molybdenum (whatever that does)?
It is possible to overdose on vitamins, and you can get adverse effects. It‘s not really a good idea to indiscriminately ”just take everything every day“.
Depends on the vitamin. It's difficult to overdose on Vitamin C for example. Vitamin D should be dosed with caution, but taking e. g. 1000 IU a day should be safe even if you get it from other sources.
Unfortunately, this is quite common among parents who want to make their own infant formula. They don't know how to dose milligrams and give ten or a hundred times the prescribed dose to infants.
Actually, it is possible to overdose on vitamin D, though it’s relatively rare. Vitamin D toxicity, also known as hypervitaminosis D, occurs when there is an excessive amount of vitamin D in the body. This can happen through very high doses of supplements over an extended period or by accidental ingestion of high-dose vitamin D supplements.
everything including water can be toxic at high doses. when I say its not really a thing, it means that it is indeed very uncommon compared to the amount of people who take supplements.
Ok, so paracetamol (aka Tylenol, acetaminophen) overdose is also 'not really a thing', because despite it being absolutely possible to trash your liver and die, the number of people who do that (including as a suicide attempt, as does happen) is miniscule compared to the approximately everybody who takes it.
The safety margin for Vitamin D is on a totally different scale vs the safety margin of Paracetamol (which is very thin, it's easy to overdose on it). bad analogies are bad.
The trouble is that supermarket multivitamins don’t contain the amount of Vit D required to make up for lack of sunlight in the UK; you need a high-strength D tablet in addition to the D in your multivitamin
(The UK govt recommends a 100IU supplement of Vit D per day and this is what most multivitamins provide, but current understanding is that an adult needs 1000-2000IU total per day, which is hard to achieve from sunlight and food in the UK)
Quite right. I recently started taking multivitamins, and was told by the doctor I need to take 800IU per-day (based on my blood levels) of Vitamin D (I have "Olive" skin), the multivitamin provides only half of that (400IU/10uG).
You shouldn't double up on the multivitamin or you'll be overdosing on other vitamins it contains, so an additional Vit D is required.
Running the numbers, the difference in cost of taking a multivitamin all year versus taking just vitamin D works out around the price of a pint of beer.
So I might as well take the multivitamin. How do I know I'm getting enough molybdenum (whatever that does)?