Facts About Vitamins - Are Drug Store Vitamins Worth Buying? Part 1
Are the vitamins you buy in the drug store the same as those you get in food?
This two-part article will discuss how eating certain foods can eliminate your vitamin bill.
Yes, as far as certain vitamins are concerned. But food supplies a great many other essentials than vitamins, and also supplies you with vitamins that have not yet been discovered and hence can’t be packaged in cellophane.
Fortified bread is no more costly than ordinary white bread, so, in effect you receive free vitamins. Fortified breakfast cereals are better values than the super-refined kinds; whole-grain cereals even better in some respects. More and more, the grocery shelves are offering vitamin-enriched foods which are excellent v values. But one should not be tempted to purchase inferior kinds of food simply because they claim to be “vitaminized.” It will pay you to get the habit of checking the labels of fortified foods to see how many vitamin units they deliver in measured quantities.
If your doctor recommends synthetic vitamins for you, study the labels on the bottles. Check the units of various vitamins furnished by a measured dose, as stated on the label.
Certain vitamins, such as A and D, are relatively cheap. Those of the B complex are likely to be expensive. So-called “shotgun” mixtures—preparations which contain a number of different vitamins—may contain certain ones in liberal quantity while others are too scanty to be of much significance. Check your needs against the promises made on the labels.
For the ordinary person, able to sit up and take nourishment, it is practically always possible to obtain all necessary vitamins from food alone—and that without adding a cent to your grocery bill. That one doesn’t usually get necessary vitamins by wise food-shopping is an unhappy truth.
The wealthy are just as likely to suffer vitamin deficiencies as the poor. Rich, expensive foods are more likely to be vitamin-poor than the simple, common ones. The reason why many of us are vitamin starved—you have the word of scores of investigators and dozens of countrywide surveys for that—is simply that we don’t know how to spend our food dollars for greatest value. For the same amount of money, certain foods will supply three times as much Vitamin A as others.
Whenever possible, buy vitamin-fortified foods, as long as they cost no more.
