When To Rely On Diet For Vitamins & When To supplement

It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!

Have a question or a request? We love to hear from you!

In cases where we’ve already covered something, we might link to what we wrote before, but will always be happy to revisit any of our topics again in the future too—there’s always more to say!

No question/request too big or small 😎

❝What is better multivitamins or eating foods that have the vitamins? What if you don’t like the foods with the vitamins, is that when you should take the vitamins? Thank you,❞

Great question, and the short answer is that both have their place!

Firstly, per your question we’ll focus on vitamins, though the same rationale applies to minerals.

When it comes to other things that one might supplement, often it’s things that one cannot readily get from one’s food, unless one lives in a very particular place. For example, we wrote about Mimosa For Healing Your Body & Mind, which is a very respectable supplement, and/but since it comes from the bark of the mimosa tree that not only is not really a food as such, but also grows only in certain tropical places, it’s quite likely you won’t find it as a food in your local supermarket, so supplementation there already has a stronger argument for it (because having it as food is simply not an option).

We wrote more about that in a previous Q&A edition that was about supplements on the whole, rather than comparing vitamins from food to vitamins from supplements:

You can read that here: Are Supplements Worth Taking?

And a more specific assessment here: Are Longevity Supplements Worth Taking?

Now, about micronutrients and food…

Yes, food is better

If you can get sufficient vitamin coverage from your food, then yes, this is simply better on a number of levels, and scientists aren’t sure they’ve even found all of the reasons why yet—there are quite often paradoxical situations whereby food contains only a tiny fraction of the amount of a given micronutrient that one could get so much more of in a supplement, and sometimes even has lower bioavailability (i.e. less of it is absorbed), and yet the end result is that it somehow improves health outcomes more regardless.

Often this is strongest in the case of phytochemicals like polyphenols, but it’s often true for vitamins and minerals too.

Here’s an example of making sure to get the compounds from a wide variety of dietary sources: Are You Getting The Right Kinds Of Flavonoids?

Sometimes, taking supplements can even have the opposite effect of what you might expect, for example: How Taking Vitamin D Supplements Can Sabotage Your Vitamin D Levels

As for “what if you don’t like the foods with the vitamins”, then really what is best there is to find foods with those vitamins that you do like. There are a lot of foods in the world, and it is unlikely that all but the most extremely restricted eater will be averse to, say, all foods containing vitamin E.

Since this matter is often a case of people “not liking vegetables”, it’s worth noting that this is often a skill issue, and therefore rectifiable.

We wrote about that here: The Real Way To Eat More Veg If You Don’t Like Veg ← and no, the answer is not to try to “hide it!”

There are other nutritional supplements that might provide a “halfway” alterative, though

If you read the “how to eat more vegetables” article and are still certain that eating vitamin-laden foods is not the way to go for you, then rather than just taking a multivitamin that are often of low quality, you might consider fruit & vegetable extract supplements, which can often deliver a lot of the benefits (not all, but a lot) of eating a more varied plants-forward diet, in a supplement, because they also contain phytochemicals beyond the vitamins, in ways that further help.

You can learn about that here: Are Fruit & Vegetable Extract Supplements Worth It?

Want to learn more?

As for why you might want to favor getting this from food if you can, then while the title says “vitamins”, the following book discusses an assortment of vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients; the “other nutrients” category including amino acids (branched chain and essential), prebiotics and probiotics, and triglycerides of various kinds:

Eat Your Vitamins – by Mascha Davis, RDN ← see our review, here

Take care!