Long story, but I don't think I've told it here before.

Once upon a time, in grade school, I learned that vitamins were very important ("vitamins... are... very... important...") If I didn't get enough of them I'd get nasty diseases like scurvy, beriberi and pellagra. When I occasionally tried a multivitamin pill I didn't feel noticeably better, though, and meanwhile I wasn't showing any obvious signs of scurvy, beriberi or pellagra. I figured that what they were saying about vitamins being good was probably exaggerated, just like the stuff they were saying about coffee, cigarettes, and candy being bad.

Later, while I was in college, someone whose opinion I trusted assured me that vitamin supplements were seldom necessary because the normal American diet already provided all the vitamins we really needed. I loved that reassurance and decided to believe it.

A few years later, on lunch breaks from work, I'd eat something quick and convenient like a fruit pastry and a cola. Turnovers and Cokes were the normal American diet (more or less) so I still had to be getting my share of vitamins and minerals. In the evening I'd eat something like a liverwurst sandwich. Liverwurst was made from liver (obviously) and liver had lots of Vitamin A -- so no deficiencies there.

During that same time I happened to catch the worst case of flu I'd ever had. I missed two weeks of work and spent most of that time in bed with a cough, headache, and worse. Not that that could possibly have had anything to do with vitamin deficiencies, but just for the heck of it I thought I'd review the official nutritional content of what I'd been eating and see how it compared to what were supposed to be the requirements. I was startled to find that I was way low on a few vitamins (including A and C) and not much better on the rest. Liverwurst, it turned out, actually contained very little Vitamin A.

I started looking for books on nutrition and soon found one that actually spoke to me, Adelle Davis's Let's Eat Right to Keep Fit. Davis, a nutritionist by profession, argued that most doctors had received only a few hours of nutrition instruction in med school, didn't really know much about it, and tended to underestimate its importance. Standards such as the "minimum daily requirements" of her day tended to be directed toward preventing disease, not optimizing health. She devoted about a chapter to each nutrient or group of related nutrients describing what they were necessary for, where to obtain them, what could happen without them, and what kind of improvement happened when they were supplied again.

Davis also mentioned that that the B vitamins, in particular, tended to work together. Supplementing only one or a few B vitamins was likely to increase your need for the others and even produce a deficiency. Earlier in her career, when vitamins were just beginning to be widely recognized, workers in defense plants had been issued little packets with substantial doses of just a few of the B vitamins. Some had eventually contacted her with what sounded like serious deficiency symptoms of other B vitamins. She'd told them to stop taking the packets right away and their symptoms had begun to improve even in the few days before they came to see her. For me, one of the most important things Davis spelled out was the proportions in which B vitamins should be taken: so much B1, B2, and B6; so much Niacin; so much Folic Acid, Pantothenic Acid, PABA, Choline, Inositol, B12, and Biotin. Ever since then, I've been buying low-dose B supplements (whatever is available in my area at the time) and rounding them out with modest but proportional doses of the other B vitamins. One trick I've learned is that excess B2 shows up in urine; whenever I've taken more than I actually need, I pee bright yellow. I try to keep my dosage of B2 at the point where that just starts to happen, and the other B vitamins in proportion. I figure that way I should be getting just slightly too much of everything. I also try to follow Davis's recommendations on other vitamins (A, C, D, E), minerals, and essential fatty acids. This seems to have been working well for me so what more can I say?