Vitameatavegamin! Snake Oil!
I never really understood this, but for whatever reason, some people really think of vitamins as kind of a be-all-end-all cure for all sorts of health issues – and many times, this is how they are marketed. I think it might have started with Linus Pauling and his bogus Vitamin C obsession, but the strange idea that large doses of vitamins will prevent all sorts of cancers and metabolic diseases seems to have caught on very strongly in a variety of weird parts of the country, especially the New Age, alternative medicine crowd. I think that might have something to do with the perceived high price of drugs, the popular hysteria about “artificial chemicals” and their effects on the body, and a distinct anti-corporation distrust of the pharmaceuticals industry and mainstream medicine.
(As an aside, I myself have noticed that Asians seem to be very partial to the “supplement craze”; maybe it has a lot to do with their centuries-long fascination of bogus health remedies and bodily “balance”, as with the Daoists? But Europe does have some past with that kind of thought, such as the balance of the bodily humors idea of Galen. So why does Daoism still have such a great hold on Asian popular thinking, while the humors theory lies in the wasteland of discarded thought? Is it because of the Enlightenment that took hold in the West?)
Anyway, vitamins probably aren’t really a cure for anything except, well, vitamin deficiency, and finally more and more studies are coming out debunking the “New Age-y” obsession with vitamins and multivitamins. It doesn’t seem that there’s much science at all to support any of the vast claims that supplement manufacturers claim.
