Vitamins and minerals can't just be replaced with supplements, bioavailability is a massive part of nutrition. One can't just take pills and assume your GI tract will be able to absorb a majority of that like you're eating real food.
Many nutrients require other nutrients to even be absorbed in the first place. Many vitamins are fat-soluble, meaning they get to you through something fatty. Calcium is worthless if you don't get the vitamin D to help put it to use, things like that
and even further: some can't be absorbed by us directly at all and the bacterial flora in our gut must do that for us before we can benefit from it. Those bacteria must be supported and replenished, too.
Vitamins and minerals can 100% be replaced by supplements, but not all phytonutrients and fiber can. If you take cheap worthless forms of vitamins or minerals when better forms are available, that's on you.
Yes, the microbiotia need feeding, mainly via fiber. They synthesize whatever else they need on their own.
> If you take cheap worthless forms of vitamins or minerals when better forms are available, that's on you.
Is there some sort of readily available system/metric/standard that a normal consumer can use to evaluate the bio-absorbability in a bottle of vitamins? I know some of them have higher-than-recommended FDA daily values, presumably to make up for the availability, but... as with so much of the supplements industry, it all seems like mostly untrustworthy marketing?
Shouldn't it be possible to calculate (and label) dosage * absorbability of a particular source in pill form = effective dosage?
I don't know of any singular resource, but if you ask me here or in r[eddit]/FoodNerds about a specific vitamin or mineral, I will be happy to share what I know. You can message the mods there if you want with a specific question.
The FDA doesn't set the values, and be glad they don't because they're very corrupt in ways you wouldn't realize. If it were up to the FDA, every product that doesn't pay the FDA a bribe of $1 million for "certification" would be banned, and then everything would cost the consumer 10x. You would also then have to pay a useless licensed practitioner for the privilege of buying anything, typically at a dose that would be too low to improve health. The NIH ODS sets them, and you can read them at https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/
There is no standard because each vitamin and mineral is unique and special. There are some heuristics, but they only go so far. For example, an ideal dose is often (but not always) close to the average of the minimum and maximum limits.
And believe me when I say that I do my best to keep the cost as low as possible while keeping the quality good enough.
Thank you! I swear people are acting like one, no one has ever thought of this before, and two that whole foods and the ways we prepare them are magically ideally bioavailable to us like plants give a shit.
Many nutrients require other nutrients to even be absorbed in the first place. Many vitamins are fat-soluble, meaning they get to you through something fatty. Calcium is worthless if you don't get the vitamin D to help put it to use, things like that
and even further: some can't be absorbed by us directly at all and the bacterial flora in our gut must do that for us before we can benefit from it. Those bacteria must be supported and replenished, too.