I've been taking Vitamin C pills because I caught a cold.

The bottle says that each tablet has about 415% the recommended amount of vitamin C. Why does a person need more than 100%? Don't I just pee the excess out anyways?

Depends if you are out a sea a lot... They don't want you to catch Scurvy...

Unless you are a pirate and then Scurvy is cool...

There are two basic kinds of vitamins, fat soluble (Vitamins A,D,E,K) and water soluble (all the rest). You never want to take more than 100% of the fat solubles, they build up in your fatty tissue. You're partially right in that the excess water solubles will wash out in your urine.

100% of the RDA is the minimum a person should have on a daily basis, and modern diets don't provide this in most cases. So you might be running in the negatives.

If your body has special needs, say stress in your life to use a common example, extra B vitamins help you deal with it, magnesium would help your muscles relax, and so forth. Lack of sunlight could result in Vitamin D deficiency, and that has lots of negative consequences.

Vitamins A,C,E are helpful in healing.

Just a few 'for instances'. Hope this helps.

Be very-very careful with vitamin E.
It is easy to overdose,
if you have a mild vitamin E overdose you will be nauseous, tired, sleepy.
Very high-dosage vitamin E supplements may increase all-cause mortality.

It takes an AMAZINGLY small amount of Vitamin C to prevent scurvy. In other words...you have to be super deficient to contract it. Why do we garnish gin, rum, and vodka drinks with citrus? Because the British navy a LONG time ago figured out that even this relatively tiny amount of vitamin C in a citru wedge went a long way to prevent scurvy.

To the OP yeah all water soluble vitamins are passed if unused by the body, but Vitamin C can't hurt. Well it can give you diarrhea in 2000-4000 mg doses. The theory is that the more is available, the more will be used when the immune system is strained like when fighting a cold. Does it work? It doesn't hurt. If you want to get rid of your cold quicker...use Zicam...it DOES work.

Zicam, zicam, zicam.

It works. I started feeling crummy on Wednesday. Stuffy, achy, sore throat. Bought Zicam at 2 in the afternoon. And now...2 says later...I feel fine. Not stuffy, no aches, throat isn't sore.

Can't endorse it highly enough.

Oh, and I was just getting worried that I might have to turn elsewhere in the internet to learn something trivial and new today!


Is there ColdFX in the US? That's stuff is popular here, I've used it to ward off a few colds.

It's available stateside as well. Looks to be mostly ginseng? Zicam is an anti-viral.

Same goes for Vitamin A. While you can liberally eat carrots (carotene), animal sources of A (retinoid) can pump you up to dangerous levels. Especially liver consumption is something to be cautious about.

My kids love liverwurst, and if they had their way they'd be overdosing on Vitamin A pretty quickly.

D is another fat soluble one, but is next to impossible to OD (but relatively easy to be deficient with - especially in areas where there's not much sunlight).

There's a lot of debate over huge dosages of Vitamin C (see "Vitamin C megadosage"). Daily recommended dosages of Vitamin C range from 40mg (UK) to 95mg (US). Tolerable Upper Intake Level is 2000mg (US), but megadose advocates such as Vitamin C Foundation recommend 3000mg (when healthy) to 30,000mg (when sick). 30,000mg of Vitamin C would require 75kg of lemons or 500kg of apples per day.

I try to keep my intake above 100mg daily, but exceeding TUIL without supplements is pretty much impossible. Blackcurrant is very high in Vitamin C (containing 5 times as much C as lemons), but to hit 2000mg you'd have to eat 1kg a day.

Most people get sick often because they have a lack of Zinc in their system. Therefore Zinc pills should be taken 3 times a day.

no pill is usually the best pill...
vitamin C is sad to be harmless, even in big amounts (500%), but still, i definitely wouldn't take it for a very long time
your body needs some balance and overdosing it by anything is just not good...

I'm not overly against taking supplements, especially if you know what you're doing. As stupid as it sounds in the world where food is increasingly easy to come by, managing a balanced diet is increasingly difficult.

Eating smart is the best way to go, but not everyone is equipped with the required knowledge to navigate successfully in the sea of all the edible junk that surrounds us these days.

As for Vitamin C, the Vitamin C Foundation's recommendation is 130-260 times the WHO's recommendation. While I consider that to be mostly lunacy, I wouldn't worry about most dosages below Tolerable Upper Intake Limit (which itself is 40 times the minimum). WHO minimum is basically what you need to avoid scurvy.

Hey, can anyone tell me what happens when you get overdosed in a certain vitamin or mineral like vitamin c?

Try using a search engine. That's where I found this on Vitamin C Overdose.

And Deazy86, zinc is included in a good multivitamin. You could take it alone but why?

'The bottle says that each tablet has about 415% the recommended amount of vitamin C. Why does a person need more than 100%? Don't I just pee the excess out anyways?'

i belive its cause u cant absorb all so u pump in more so more is absorbed
its mostly wasted


" I started feeling crummy on Wednesday. Stuffy, achy, sore throat. Bought Zicam at 2 in the afternoon. And now...2 says later...I feel fine. Not stuffy, no aches, throat isn't sore."
well 90% 9of the figths won by your own body. meds only help. that can be helped by good diet and exercise. and happy thoughts

When my friends get sick, i always tell them to take like three times the normal does of vitamin c that they usually take.

i think it floods your system out or something like that. but they usually feel better within a few days. so idk if that even helps at all.