Hi all -

It's my 1st time here and am so glad to find you guys. I'm 40 and just recently started taking supplements, because I have been feeling run down lately and seem to get ill more often. Just received a clean bill of health from my doctor - including chest xrays and complete blood workup.

My husband is voicing concerns about the supplements on a daily basis and wants asks how I know it's ok to take "all of the crap" I'm taking. :( From reading up, these seem like pretty standard supplements. Does anyone see a problem with mixing these? My husband seems to think I'm going to die from them. :angel:

Multi-Vitamin (One A Day)
Garlic - Powder, aged (2x daily - I'm still confused about whether or not I'm actually getting the Alliciin from this!!)
Milk Thistle (2x daily)
Co-Q-10 (75mg - 1x daily)
Cod Liver Oil
Extra Vit C (500 mg - but I only take half. The rest comes from my multi)
Calcium - (500mg - 1x in evening. The rest comes from my multi, which gives 45% of RDA)

I really want to add liquid aloe vera for the many health benefits it provides. Is it ok to do so? And can anyone tell me a good brand?

Thanks so much - I'm so happy to have found people that know about supplements!

This is just from my particular point of view, but as I see it, there is no particular danger from taking a wide variety of nutritional supplements, anymore than there is a danger from eating a variety of fruits and vegetables. Some of us take 20 or 30 different supplements or more. I believe Harvey Kamil of NBTY, who has been involved in the vitamin business for about 25 years (and ought to know what he is doing, considering that he often learns about various medical studies reporting good and bad results involving supplements in the course of his business), takes about 40. I am sometimes amused when someone who takes four or five supplements wonders if he or she is taking too much. If I were going to commit suicide, I would probably take an overdose of a prescription drug, but I have never heard of anyone committing suicide by taking vitamins.

But of course, the important thing is not to get too much of any one type of nutrient or supplement. You wouldn't want to take too many at one time of the type that might thin the blood, for example. Like any other thing, more is not necessarily better, and you have to know what you are doing. Vitamin A in particular can be toxic above certain limits. I would make sure that the combination of the Vitamin A in the Multi, and in the Cod Liver Oil, is not excessive. As I understand it, Vitamin C in the amounts you are taking you don't really need to worry about, as any excess is excreted by the body anyway. I don't think you need to cut the Vit C pill in half, if that is what you are doing.

There have been several studies over the last two years indicating that Vitamin D is crucial in colds and cancer, and it is difficult to get enough vitamin D from food, and UV rays from the sun are carcinogenic (one in five Americans gets skin cancer from it). (I use sunscreen and a hat, and stay out of the sun; I have had a life-threatening skin cancer already.) Anyway, I have seen more than one study speculating that 1,000 IU of Vitamin D from supplements per day (which is way above the RDA), would cut the rate of certain cancers IN HALF. The studies theorize that one reason black people get more cancer is that their skin absorbs less Vitamin D from the sun, and one reason that people get more colds in the Winter is also attributed to less absorption of Vitamin D from the sun; not enough Vitamin D weakens the immune system.

One thing you might consider is taking glucosamine, even if you have no arthritis symptoms yet. Many older people die from complications involving knee and hip surgery later in life. I was particularly impressed with a study from England about four or five years ago. They took x-rays at the beginning, and it was a three year study, double-blind, etc., of people with arthritis. Half the people took glucosamine, and half did not. At the end of the three years, they x-rayed everyone again. These were x-rays of the knees. Those arthritis patients who had taken glucosamine showed little or no deterioration of their knees, but those who did not take it showed continued deterioration. X-rays do not lie. Glucosamine is the only easily available substance you can take to help slow or prevent the disease of arthritis.

I don't really know about Aloe Vera, so I will let someone else comment on that. One thing, an honest manager I know at a Vitamin World store, a man I know personally, told me that he had started taking Noni Juice after different people with serious diseases like cancer came back to the store and told him it really worked for them. Of course, he knew it was just anecdotal, but he couldn't help but be so impressed because so many people had told him this. That started him taking it. I take it too, now.