STUDIES OCCASIONALLY APPEAR warning people about taking too many vitamins.

Earlier this week research carried out at the University of Colorado in the United States found that too many vitamins can potentially lead to an increased cancer risk.

This led the Food Safety Authority of Ireland (FSAI) to call for coordinated EU guidelines that factor fortified foods into the recommended amounts of multivitamins people should take.

Where do you get vitamins from?

Most people do not go out of their way to take dietary supplements and there can be some confusion about where concentrated supplies of vitamins come from.

One key source is fortified foods.

These are foods to which nutrients have been added artificially. According to the European Commission, the three reasons for doing this are to replace nutrition lost during the manufacturing process; to substitute a nutrient that might have existed in the traditional alternative (i.e. margarine); or to further enrich foods.

This can be a good thing as your diet might not contain all of the required nutrients without them.

One clear example of this is with breakfast cereals. It has been shown that by the 1990s, iron-enriched breakfast cereals had become the main source of iron in children diets in the United Kingdom. Previously, in the 1950s, it had been meat.

Food fortification has allowed for nutrient levels to be maintained despite changing national dietary habits.

EU-wide regulation controls the type and amount of additional nutrients added to food.

How are these harmful? 

Taken alone, these nutrients that exist in fortified foods benefit consumers.

The concern arises from taking concentrated supplementary amounts of vitamins. This is what the FSAI is concerned with as it has been shown that taking high amounts of additional nutrients over a period of time can be harmful.

The Irish food safety body wants to see maximum safe levels introduced across the European Union.

These levels would be lower than the ‘tolerable upper intake level’ (a measurement used internationally to define the maximum amount of a nutrient a person can take long-term before it becomes harmful to them) but potentially higher than the recommended daily allowance (RDA).

According to Matthew Lederman, the medical adviser with Forks Over Knives, a dietary website, multivitamin supplements do not benefit most people.

“There is no proof that multivitamins have any benefit for most people, and there is scientific proof that they may cause harm. For example, vitamin A, beta-carotene, folic acid, iron, selenium, and vitamin E are all healthy when you eat them in food, but they have been shown to be dangerous when consumed in supplements,” he said.

Instead of listening to the marketing claims by the supplement industry, focus on eating whole plant foods to get the essential vitamins and nutrients you need.

Read: Take a lot of vitamins? You might want to stop…