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Originally Posted by littledevil1908  hey, right now i take a daily multivitamin and a hair strengthening vitamin. my questions is: as these vitamins are "dietary supplements", can i still take them if i am on a fast? or, do i have to be eating food to take the vitamins in order to allow them to digest correctly? thanks for your help! |
Tell us which vitamins you're taking, though. (preferably link to a product page or something)
Vitamins need either dietary water or fat to be absorbed, depending on the water(lipophobic or lipophilic). This is from memory so I'm not entirely sure:
Fat: A, D, E, K
Water: B, C, Folate
(there are more like choline but I forgot what they were)
If you're on a water fast then you obviously won't be getting much fat.
The B vitamins are different because there are 12(well, no, but they go up to B12) of them and you need all of them. I think all of them are water-soluble.
Every vitamin also has different forms. Your body will convert each form of a vitamin to one particular form before it uses it. The efficiency of this conversion depends on the form. For example, retinol is ~12 times more efficient than beta-carotine when it gets converted into some other thing that starts with an 'r'. Some examples of forms:
Vitamin A would normally come as retinol or a cartenoid that's a retinol precursor like beta-carotine. Beta-carotine is less efficient than retinol and will make it harder for the body to absorb other cartenoids in your diet which is pretty bad because they're potent antioxidants(like that one thing in tomatoes). Retinol is also found in animal products and cartenoids are found in plants. You don't have to worry about an A overdose if it's from cartenoids. Only retinol can cause one. A good vitamin uses plant extracts to include more cartenoids.
Vitamin D can come as D2 or D3. D3 is the animal form and is more efficient than D2. Again, you can only overdose on D3(which is pretty hard BTW).
Any multivitamin you see on TV is crap. Don't buy it.
Vitamin E has eight forms but not much is known about most of them. Alpha-tophericol is the only one that's really counted. (not so sure about this) A nice vitamin would probably have multiple forms since they exist that way in nature.
Vitamins can be destroyed by heat. (although heat enhances the absorbtion of lycopene in tomatoes by freeing it from proteins) Minerals can't.
Vitamins also need minerals to be absorbed and used properly(ex. calcium for D). Most multivitamins come with some minerals and so do most other vitamins. The crappier vitamins don't come with anything to enhance absorbtion which could be good or bad depending on what you want, since minerals also have multiple forms(ionic bonds usually) and they exist in nature in multiple forms.
So, make sure to buy high-quality vitamins. If you're a vegan, that'll change the types of vitamins you should buy. A good vitamin will come with minerals to help absorbtion. You might want to stop using your hair-strengthening vitamin since I'm guessing it'll need fat for most of its contents(it would probably include D, E, and boron?).