You pride yourself on being healthy and fit. You’ve been dieting and taking vitamins for a while now, and you’re standing in the grocery aisle trying to find something to help you stay healthier and live longer. You’re eating lots of raw fruits and vegetables and some whole grains, and you’re sure that fortified bread, cereal, and spaghetti noodles you just picked up are going keep you so healthy that you’ll never be sick again.
Guess again. The truth is you could be doing a tad bit too much for your health. Now, I don’t know about your mom, but my mother always told me, “You can always have too much of a good thing.” Turns out, as much as I hate to admit it, she was right.
Yes, that’s right; you can over dose on vitamins. The symptoms can be mild at first but if you ignore the signs long enough a vitamin overdose can be toxic; which is why it’s important to know the symptoms of a vitamin overdose so you know when to cut back so that you can stay healthy and balanced.
Most vitamin overdoses aren’t caused just by taking a multivitamin though. In fact, most vitamin overdoses come from a combination of eating too many fortified foods and taking super absorbent multivitamins.
With so much of our bread is being fortified with vitamins and minerals, along with our cereal, noodles, and whole grain chips and crackers, and other staples that are commonly bought at the grocery store, you may not even need a multivitamin.
So how do you recognize a vitamin over dose?
It depends on the vitamin. One of the most common vitamin overdoses is vitamin A, and it’s one I have experienced myself.
The average adult requires 700 mcg of vitamin A, everyday for healthy vision, bone growth, reproduction, cell division, and cell differentiation. Vitamin A also helps to regulate your immune system, which helps prevent or fight off infections by making white blood cells that destroy harmful bacteria and viruses. Vitamin A also may help lymphocytes (a type of white blood cell) fight infections more effectively.
If you eat, milk, cheese, eggs, meat, cream, fish oil, carrots, spinach, kale, sweet potatoes, mangos, and blueberries every day, plus take a multivitamin that has a full day’s supply of vitamin A, then you probably, (I’m just guessing here.) don’t need foods that are fortified with vitamin A as well.
Hypervitaminosis A is when a high storage of vitamin A in the body that can lead to toxic symptoms. There are four major consequences of Hypervitaminosis A: birth defects, liver abnormalities, reduced bone mineral density, and central nervous system disorders.
Hypervitaminosis can be toxic when a person consumes over 500,000 IU of vitamin A per day. The signs of Acute Toxic Hypervitaminosis A includes: nausea, vomiting, headache, dizziness, blurred vision and muscular uncoordination.
When there is a high intake of provitamin A carotenoids it can turn your skin a yellowish-orange color.
Now, I’ve never had yellow or orange skin from taking too much vitamin A but I have had headaches and mild nausea that I thought may be related to a vitamin overdose. It was never any real problem, but I knew something in my body wasn’t right.
The reason why I thought that it might be my multivitamin is because it would only happen after I took a full dose of my vitamins. When I took only half a dose, of my multivitamins, I didn’t have headaches or nausea. So I simply lowered the dosage and went on with life.
My symptoms went away just as quickly as I changed my vitamin dosage, but if your case may be different. If you continue to have these symptoms and you’re unable to pin point the reason why the symptoms are continuing, then it would be best to talk to your doctor and let him/her know about everything that you’re taking, including any multivitamins and supplements you may be on.
