i love to take vitamins and supplements. i detoxed from them for 2 days, got a huge headache, and when i started taking them again my muscles felt weak. i wonder if they can be toxic?

it wouldn't suprise me at all to find out that some are. If there's balance in your diet, you probably don't need them anyway.

Natural Hygienists regard them as toxic. I've seen Bryan mention this often.

they do make me feel good though

how long does that feeling last though?

My mother suffered severe liver damage as a result of too many vitamins and supplements.

I think a B12 supplement is necessary, but, on a regular basis, everything else can be gotten from food.

I just recently discovered the "pantry" on nutritiondata.com, where you can put in all the foods you ate that day and then get a bar graph showing which nutrients you may be lacking, plus the total consumption for each nutrient in grams, plus the % DV (the percent of the recommended daily allowance that you consumed for each nutrient). I like this tool better than fitday.com because there are more raw foods available so you don't have to customize. Also, the serving sizes are more adjustable, and there's more information.

If you know you are getting enough of everything already, you probably won't feel the need to take vitamins and supplements.

To access "pantry", go to nutritiondata.com, then click on "Track your total consumption". A bar will appear on the right. Click "pantry help". Read the information there and then click the "pantry" link in the first paragraph on the page.

Before going to the "pantry", I found it useful to first go to the link just above "Track your total consumption" called "Estimate your daily needs". By recording your activity level info plus height and weight at this site, they will calculate for you your own individual needs for the major nutrients including protein, vitamins, and minerals.

Make a copy of that list to have available when you go to the pantry. You may be amazed as I was to find that on a raw food diet you will have consumed way over 100% for most of your nutrients.

Best wishes, Ally

Rosemary,

I forgot to mention that if you try the Pantry at nutritiondata.com, you have to be sure you put something in the "quantity" column for each food you enter, even if it seems redundant.

For example, if you entered "1 cup of parsley" in your Pantry, you still have to put a "1" in the "quantity" column or your food may not be counted at all when you get your total.

-Ally

what supplements are you taking, Rosemary? I take a bunch myself...nursing...

thanks for the link Ally

ally, thanks for pointing out the pantry feature on ND. i love it!

Ally,

I'm so sorry to hear that about your mom! Care to give more details? I have a friend that takes an awful lot of supplements and would like to share her story with him.

24 Carrots,

It was a long time ago that my mother got the liver damage - I think in the 1980s. She's no longer around here, so I can't ask her any details (she graduated off the planet about 6 years ago), but if I remember correctly, the liver damage resulted more from the vitamins than the supplements. She was in her 70s at the time.

She found out through her regular physician about her liver damage. I distinctly remember her telling me that her doctor said her liver was as bad as if she had been a severe alcoholic. She was able to recover by simply cutting way down on the vitamins or maybe cutting them out altogether. Either she told me or I heard it somewhere else, that her reaction was somewhat common when a person overloads on a certain vitamin or vitamin combination.

Sorry I couldn't help more. Maybe a doctor would have more information on this, and they could maybe check your friend's liver.

Best wishes, -Ally

One thing I've always thought when I would watch the number of pills my residents had to take every day was "look at all the synthetic garbage they have to take to live!" It just seems an agonizing prolonging of the inevitable. If they were fed better and the actual illnesses treated instead of treating each symptom with another group of pills, many wouldn't be sick at all.

yikes, i'm gonna get my liver checked!
I take B's and antioxidants Ally.