More than 21m Britons are on supplement pills, many having lost track of what they actually do. Yet they have become a sort of health insurance policy for the modern age, despite the fact that recent studies have suggested vitamin C does little to stop you catching a cold. But taking supplements cannot do you any harm. Or can it?
A European Court judgment last week upheld a European Union ruling preventing the sale of certain vitamin and mineral supplements whose health benefits have not been proven. Officials have drawn up a ?positive list? of 112 that have been verified: everything else is effectively banned. British health food retailers and nutritionists have, however, appealed for a further 500 to be added to the list and they are now under review.
Once the list has been dealt with, the EU will explore the upper limits of vitamin dosage permissible and, later still, it is expected herbal supplements will come under scrutiny. Many nutritionists are up in arms, arguing that meddling Eurocrats are limiting consumer choice. Others ? mostly dieticians ? say it?s time this all but unregulated area was taken into hand. Vitamins and minerals, they say, can be harmful.
Too much vitamin C, for example, can give you mouth ulcers and diarrhoea. You can get kidney stones if you overdose on calcium. Excessive iron intake can prompt digestive problems and increase the risk of bowel cancer.
The checkout girl at Boots or Holland & Barrett can hardly be expected to be au courant with all of this and neither can consumers. Yet so-called megadoses of supplements are highly popular, on the basis that our fruit and vegetables have fewer nutrients than they used to and the recommended daily allowance (RDA) of vitamins and minerals established 50 years ago is out of date.
This kind of self-medication, however, can be dangerous. Catherine Collins, chief dietician at London?s St George?s hospital, once treated a patient who had overdosed on vitamin A and suffered liver failure. The pills, manufactured in Korea, contained 10 times the recommended amount.
Such cases are rare, though. A normal dose of over-the-counter medicine such as paracetamol does more toxic damage to the body than any vitamin.
Collins has welcomed the EU directive but believes there should be tighter controls and regulations on supplements. ?They should be treated in the same way as paracetamols, not Smarties,? she said.
?There?s nothing wrong with taking a multivitamin a day but the trend now is for people to look for problems in their health where there aren?t any.
I personally agree with Mother Inferior. Natural does not always mean safe and people do take these things as a form of "health insurance" for problems that are not there in the first place. There is also a lot of money to be made out of selling such products also.