Athletes need more vitamins, right? right??
So here is a golden recommendation that we all hear from companies and also some professionals: "Athletes need more vitamins than the average person."
Sounds right, we indeed tend to "use" more vitamins practicing sports. But is 100% Daily Value enough? How about multi-vitamin supplements with 500%? 1000%? Well, now things come unclear. I started reading the article " Sports Nutrition Basics Part 4 – Vitamins & Minerals" from Sport-Fitness-Advisor and this subject came into my attention (I have never stopped to think about it, even when I was taking multi-vitamin supplements :( ). Here is the deal, we all know that Recommended Intake, Daily value and other measures are recommendations based on untrained people and usually a diet based on 2500kcal. Athletes (professional or just gym rats) tend to be more interested in having a better diet and consume more vitamins than sedentary people. Surely it all comes to how your diet is prepared (macros, calories, etc). Source: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/d26f/a93df92501ed4ea6b3e7b86e6c49f985e2ee.pdf http://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/9/11/1266/pdf https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19917454 Considering you supposedly already reach 100% of the recommended intake for your diet, what happens if you consume another 100% (total of 200% of DV). Well, it may just make no difference at all (at least you pee will be super yellow or green, right?). Most of the vitamins offer no advantage (performance, muscle gain, fat loss) if being consumed in high dosages. So yes, considering your diet is good and taking multivitamins (making the overall consumption >100% of DV) offers no real advantage. Here are some of the ISSN conclusions about this subject: The overall review of the literature supports the viewpoint that multivitamin/mineral supplements are unnecessary for athletes or other physically active individuals who are on a well-balanced diet with adequate calories. For example, several studies have provided multivitamin/mineral supplements over prolonged periods and reported no significant effects on both laboratory and sport-specific tests of physical performance . In one of the most comprehensive studies, Telford and others evaluated the effect of long term (7–8 months) vitamin/mineral supplementation (100 to 5,000 times the RDA) on exercise performance of nationally ranked athletes in training at the Australian Institute of Sport. The athletes were tested on a variety of sport-specific tasks as well as common tests of strength, anaerobic power, and aerobic endurance. They reported no significant effect of the supplementation protocol on any measure of physical performance when compared to athletes whose vitamin and mineral RDA were met by normal dietary intake. Source: https://jissn.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1550-2783-1-2-1 Also a more complete table relating vitamin consumption and performance: Table 1 Proposed Nutritional Ergogenic Aids - Vitamins Nutrient RDA Proposed Ergogenic Value Summary of Research Findings Vitamin A Males 900 mcg/d Females 700 mcg/d Constituent of rhodopsin (visual pigment) and is involved in night vision. Some suggest that vitamin A supplementation may improve sport vision. No studies have shown that vitamin A supplementation improves exercise performance . Vitamin D 5 mcg/d (age Read the full article
