Vitamins question...

[Girliefriendlikesflowers]

Apologies if this is a daft question but can you over dose on vitamins?

I normally take a multivitamin with iron and evening primrose (which helps with pmt) I want to also take cod liver oil which includes vitamin D and A.

If I take all these vitamins am I over dosing on them?

It's technically possible, I would've thought certainly you can have a build up and remember that you will be getting vits from your food too. It would take quite a lot of vitD and iron for your levels to be over the safety level but it is still possible (unless you know you're low/deficient - a lot of folk are when it comes to iron and vitD).

Too high levels of water soluble vits like C and the Bs get flushed out so it would be very hard to overdose.

I'd cross check the levels on your supplements based on the RDAs (which generally tend to be on the low end of the spectrum, but they're there for a reason).

Be cautious with Vit. A, you can overdose on that, a bit of info here.

Thank you, it tells me on the cod liver oil capsule that it's giving me 84% of vitamin D rda and 100% on the multi vitamin so that's why I was wondering! I was aware of some risk of vitamin A as well...

Yes I believe you can overdose on most vitamins apart from the water soluble ones such as B12. Standard multivitamins generally don't contain a high amount of anything and stick to the RDA, so it depends on how much of each are in what you do take.

I take an Omega 3 supplement instead of cod liver oil for this reason. As Vitamin A is fat-soluble it certainly would be possible to overdose.

Vitamin a is the one you shouldn’t exceed daily amounts of. It’s hard to overdose on vitamin d, quite often you’ll find 1000% of rda in pills. Vitamin c overdose would give you the runs but again up to about 1000% of rda you tend to be fine. Multi vitamins tend to have small doses of vitamins in.

You can overdose on fat soluble vitamins, but water soluble ones are just peed out

Thank you for your replies, I think I'll stick to CLO and EP but not take the multivitamin as well....