Vitamins prevent anorexia and cavities. Read more here. This strong statement is based on informal clinical reports. It’s been over two and a half years since I started actively blogging. The first blog proposed that anorexia and other eating disorders are vitamin deficiency diseases. I’ve been researching and corresponding about the relationship between anorexia and vitamins ever since. There is now substantial informal clinical data from colleagues. Young women taking extra vitamins do not become anorexic.

If you are looking for good doses to start with, click here.

Parents providing supplements to their children want to see results. Preventing anorexia is invisible. That’s why cavities are important. Children prone to anorexia will usually have some kind of oral health problem. The vitamin supplements will improve oral health. In addition to preventing cavities, the vitamins improve the condition of the gums, and strengthen and whiten teeth. The improvement will show up in good dental records.

The physicians I know want to see data from double-blind, clinical controlled trials. This can not happen. Vitamin D is obtained in optimal doses from sunshine. You can’t use sunshine in a blinded trial. The most effective doses of vitamin D from pills (4000 – 6000 IU/day) involve unacceptable risks. Although not especially serious if caught early, it is easy to take far too much by accident and hard to broadly educate the population of the dangers. As a result, serious vitamin D overdoses are far too common. You can read several moving personal accounts here.

4000 mg/day of vitamin C can not be taken in a double blind trial. It often has an obvious beneficial laxative effect. This is as good an explanation as any as to why vitamin C is the most popular vitamin supplement.

The doses of vitamins required to prevent anorexia are well established as safe and effective. The doses for vitamin C and niacin are set at the upper safe limit value set by the Food and Nutrition Board. There is no more conservative definition of safety than that. Thiamine is so safe that the Food and Nutrition Board has not set an upper safe limit. The Board does not act until there is statistically significant clinical evidence of harm. Vitamin D is best obtained from sunshine and there are no reported cases of vitamin D toxicity from overexposure to the sun.

There is a high prevalence of anorexia amongst female atheletes. Read more here. If you want to help with the public health campaign to prevent anorexia with vitamin supplements, educating the parents and coaches of young female athletes will provide more value than educating the public at large.

Vitamins are vital parts of food. Vitamin D is probably misnamed because it is best obtained from fresh air and sunshine (long known to be important to human health). Feeding children is the responsibility of parents, not physicians. Physicians see their role as fixing the problems caused by poor nutrition. They are not nutritionists. Health insurance does not pay for nutrition counseling. As a result, the highly challenging field of nutrition does not pay well and does not attract the best scientific talent. The primary source of funding for nutritionists comes from companies that manufacture foods. Between the lack of funding and commercial interests, it isn’t easy to get sound scientific advice from professional nutritionists. So – parents are largely on their own in their efforts to decide whether or not to use vitamin supplements and sunshine to prevent anorexia and optimize the health of their children.

The science of nutrition is accelerating, and a consensus around optimal vitamin doses will emerge. The nutrition community has read and understood what’s published in this blog and is actively testing the proposal. In the meantime, young women in your community continue to fall victim to a devastating preventable disease. There is much to gain and almost nothing to lose by feeding your children the doses of vitamin B1, vitamin B3, vitamin C, and vitamin D recommended in this blog. There is far more to gain by seeing to it that young women athletes get these vitamin doses. Even just one young women saved from a lifetime living with anorexia is priceless.