Vitamins

Just read Lonnie Lowery’s recent post on vitamin overdosing (maybe the wrong term for it), and am wondering how people are reacting to this. I have taken a multivitamin (GNC or Centrum) daily for years now, and I used to always add in some extra C too, but I’m thinking about backing off on that now. Do any of you take extra vitamins, B for muscle growth (per John MacCallum), E for energy, C for health, etc., or just stick with a multi and that’s it? And how much is an IU in milligrams?

Hey, I looked at the the listing of Lowery’s Articles and couldn’t find the article you mention, could you provide a link?

I was just at Dr. Berardi’s site, and I noticed under his ‘Approved Supplements’ section that he doesn’t mention any vitamin except C. Interesting. I too have been taking a Multi for a long time, so I think I’d like to research this more.

As to IU’s to mg conversion:

From FAQ - How do I convert International Units (IU) to milligrams?

[quote]How do I convert International Units (IU) to milligrams?

IU stands for International Units and is used for the measurement of drugs and vitamins.

Webster’s defines IU as: a quantity of a biologic (such as a vitamin) that produces a particular biological effect agreed upon as an international standard

What this means is that IU is dependent on the potency of the substance, and each substance would have a different IU to milligram conversion. For example, 1000 IU of Vitamin C would have a different weight than 1000 IU of Vitamin A

Since each substance would have a different conversion ratio, we cannot put up a conversion for IU to milligrams that covers everything, or even most things. Just too many different substances.

So what can you do?

Your best bet would be to contact your pharmacist. They have all the information anyone could ever want about drugs and vitamins.

You could also contact the manufacturer of the vitamin. Most manufactures will have a web site with contact information so you can email them. Try searching the web using the manufactures name or the name of the vitamin.[/quote]

Ursus,
It’s not one of his articles, it was from the blog he does here. Couple posts ago.