Depending on what the overage is, and the toxicity is for that compound.

As you say, fat soluble vitamins can be toxic at high doses. However, most of the water soluble vitamins are not, because they can be easily excreted via the kidneys (unlike the fat soluble vitamins which accumulate in adipose tissue).

Excessive dose rates can be dangerous, but it is highly dependent upon the exact compound. I would hope that the producers are being selective in what goes in at 3x the label claim, and what is dosed more closely to the label claim.

All of the active ingredients in these supplements, whether gummies or traditional pills, are deliberately over formulated to account for shelf-life. To report on this as some sort of failing, is to deliberately misunderstand how label claims work

If I put 1000 mg of a vitamin into a pill, and label it as containing 1000 mg of that vitamin. Then package it, ship it, and store it for any amount of time in a warehouse or on a store shelf, by the time you open the package to take the supplement it will have less than 1000 mg of that vitamin remaining. These compounds are highly reactive, and have a half-life. They degrade over time, even if stored in perfect conditions, which no product in commerce ever is.

Therefore, these are formulated to contain some sort of safety margin, based on how quickly that vitamin degrades in that specific formulation. If gummies are less protective than traditional pills, then either they will need to have more safety margin to ensure shelf-life claims are met, or they will need to have shorter shelf-life claims. It's the engineers triangle all over again. minimal safety margin, long-shelf life, or convenient form factor... pick 2.

That is why if you check the back of any supplement they report that the values are "guaranteed minimum" values, and not exact doses.

Bioavailability is not digestibility, and neither of them are strictly about what appears in your blood.

Digestibilty is what is disappears from your digestive tract (Nutrients consumed - nutrients excreted in your feces = nutrients digested). You can get more precise by accounting for things like endogenous losses (nutrients that the digestive process puts into your feces, thus artificially decreasing their apparent digestibilty), or to account for excretion via the urine (technical that is nutrient retention)

Bioavailability is a measure of the value of some source of a nutrient for a particular outcome. It is partially derived from digestibility, and partially an effect of how the body responds to and prioritizes the use of the increase in nutrient absorption relative to some OTHER source of that nutrient. For example. Zinc sulfate is consider to be the standard source of zinc. Zinc oxide is less digestible, and has a bioavailability that ranges between 80 and 100% of zinc sulfate. Organically complexed zinc (Zinc chelated to an amino acid such as glycine, for example) is more digestible than zinc sulfate, and can have a bioavailability of 110 to 140%, relative to zinc sulfate (the standard). Bioavailability can be determined based on any number of response metrics. Blood concentration can be one, but growth rate, fertility, bone deposition, or some other response relevant to the nutrient in question can also be the basis for determining bioavailability. And the bioavailability estimate for each of those may be different from each other (could be greater based on bone mineral deposition, than for growth rate, for example).

For a lot of nutrients, the blood concentration is not a very useful metric. For many minerals, the concentration in the blood is tightly controlled, so an increase in absorbable/digestible mineral will not change blood concentration. Instead, it will push up excretion (if the ability to store the nutrient is not very high), or increase storage in tissues (if the storage capacity is high) or a mixture of both. All without blood concentration changing much at all.

"The body does not know how to process synthetics" is pure, unadulterated, bullshit.

The body can use any nature identical synthetic, and most non-nature identical synthetics (usually due to differences in stereochemistry) also have pathways to be broken down and resynthesizes into the nature identical form. For those where some stereoisomers are not convertible, the vitamin activity of the source is accounted for. That is why we report most vitamins in IU instead of mass (mg, ng, etc.).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_unit

The issue with vitamin supply in our food has more to do with our consumption of processed foods, than with the change in actual nutrient density in foods. Processing is generally hell on things like vitamins, which are quite fragile and break down relatively quickly when exposed to heat, oxygen, or extremes of pH. All of which are common in cooking, processing, or grain fractionation.

The take away is the same. Eat less processed foods (both in quantity and degree of processing) to get more of the vitamins from them that were generated while the food was still growing, and you won't need to take supplemental vitamins. Particularly if you are consuming a highly varied diet.

Everything you said gobbledygook.

I worked (as a nutritionist) for 8 years for a major vitamin supplier (straight vitamins, not the pills themselves). The vitamins are not "low grade garbage", and being synthetic doesn't actually mean that much in terms of effect. The use of hexane or alcohol in the manufacturing process tells you precisely NOTHING about the stability or efficacy of the resulting vitamin or vitamin supplement. And your "in destroys enzymes and nutrients" tag screams "I'm an all natural nut job, who does not understand the first thing about chemistry, nutrition, or science in general".

That all said, most people do not need to take vitamins. Most who do, take far more than they need. The industry is corrupt, and under regulated. Just not for literally any of the reasons you suggest.

I was forever catching shade from my co-workers for not taking all of the supplements we sold. I determined I didn't need them, so I didn't take them, but everyone else was caught up in all of the pseudoscientific justifications our customers used to market their products. The old "it's hard to convince someone of something they have a financial interest in not understanding" thing comes to mind whenever I think about those conversations.

That sounds like a pretty horrific experience. I'm sorry your great uncle had to go through that.

If you Great Uncle had been put onto a hospice service, pain management would have become the top priority. Until that point, the medical professionals are required to behave as thought saving the patients life is the priority. Sometimes pain medications can interfere with that. Certain pain meds suppress respiration, so if the patient is having trouble breathing or with O2 saturation, then skimping on the pain meds to keep the patient alive becomes the trade off. However, once a patient goes on palliative care, the patients comfort becomes the priority, because it is now accepted that they are actively dying, and that there is no point in continuing to prolong the life at the expense of comfort.

Denial of what is happening by the patient family is very much the norm. My mother did hospice nursing for ~15 years, and the majority of families had at least a few members actively denying what was happening, and trying to blame the hospice service for not saving their family members life. Despite that being the opposite of the services job.

My grandfather was in failing health for over a decade in my youth. For the majority of that time he ranted and raved against laws that prevented him having the option to commit suicide with a physicians assistance. Lots of rhetoric about making the choice for himself, and other macho BS.

When the time actually came, however, he clung to life for as long as he could. His only nod to the inevitability of his impending death was to go on Hospice (hospice was rather new at the time in our area, but my mother was a hospice nurse for the service he used) and to secure a DNR (which is pretty standard for Hospice patients). He fought for every last breath

My take away from all that (and my mothers stories about other patients of hers) It is easy to be flippant about quality of live vs quantity of live when you are healthy. it is much harder to be facing that outcome imminently and still to choose a quick death over a few more days or weeks in agony.

Counter point. if it was simply a matter of brute force calculations, Amazon or some other cloud service provider could have solved it by now (or someone with deep pockets using their cloud for the computation, as is the case with generative AI).

The University will be where the theoretical framework innovation will come from. Sure, someone with deep pockets and lots of iron will be necessary to make it a reality (one of the generative AI companies is working with Microsoft for this very reason), but Generative AI is neither intelligent, nor artificial. It is a spell checking algorithm on steroids. It isn't aware of anything, it is simply good at creating the appearance of self identity and awareness.

Regardless, it will not be Meta/Facebook that makes the breakthrough. Zuck burned how much capital on the metaverse (after renaming their entire company) and a few years latter, what do they have? Nothing anyone is actually interested in using for anything other than a tech demo. It's not a matter of the metaverse being beyond us, but a matter of being a bad metaphor for how to interact with the computers. The metaphors we have now are BETTER than the metaverse. it solves no problems for users. The only problem it can be said to solve is the problem of Zuck clearly being out of ideas and Facebook clearly being out of future explosive growth. Therefore, in order to prop up the share price, Zuck NEEDS you to BELIEVE that the metaverse is going to be a thing in the near future, and that he's helping it to come into being.

With AGI, it's even worse. IF something like the metaverse were to come into being, it makes some sense that a social network company would be the one to do that. There is a certain amount of overlap in what something like a metaverse and a social network do for users. There is precisely NOTHING overlapping between what Facebook does for users, and what an AGI might do.

Just hand waiving to hide the fact that Facebooks explosive growth is far behind it, and likely never coming back.

No, itâ(TM)ll likely be a silent startup, spun off from a university lab. Iâ(TM)m sure someone youâ(TM)ve heard of will be involved in commercializing it. Probably a lot of someoneâ(TM)s. But the innovation to make it happen will not be originating with a company who already has an established business, customers, and a need to generate quarterly profit for short sighted shareholders

Yet another grift from Zuck to con investors into thinking Facebook has more growth ahead of it.

As with the metaverse, this will burn a lot of capital, but ultimately be swept under the rug. There is zero reason to believe Facebook has what it takes to create AGI, just as there was zero reason to believe Facebook could create a metaverse anyone would actually want to use.

AGI may come one day, but it will not be Facebook who delivers it. In fact, it is highly unlikely any company you might have hear of will deliver it. What is far more likely, is that Facebook will continue to jump on obvious bandwagons until they close up shop or the market finally gets wise to the grift.

Yes, every company operating in FDA regulated markets is terrified of receiving one of these letters. I am asked twice a year to go through out marketing literature and double check that weâ(TM)ve not stepped outside the bounds of what we can legally say about our products, just to be safe.

now, realistically, Bezos will be fine. The FDA tends to give companies a lot of time and opportunity to come into compliance. They tend to reserve the criminal prosecution of management for willful and repeat offenders. As long as Bezos et al. make token efforts to control this immediately, and continues to improve things (even if slowly) they should be fine.

The article is about the kids preferences, not the choices the parents make on behalf of their kids.

Fuck you!

Showing gay people exist is NOT the same as serving up hard core pornography. Implying that they are equivalent is pure bigotry.

Newsflash, asshole, not everyone concerned about kids accessing porn is a homophobe. Shit, some of those kids we are worried about are THEMSELVES gay. My oldest is gay, and non-binary, and neither makes them mature enough for porn.

Who the fuck is allowing their two year old on YouTube?

I have four kids, and I donâ(TM)t trust any of them on YouTube unsupervised. The algorithm *wants* to get them hooked on inappropriate shit.

One of my kids (6 or 7 at the time) figured out how to get to Google and YouTube on his iPad, and was watching cartoon porn of characters from his favorite shows within a day. Heâ(TM)d started looking for episodes to watch, and very quickly it started serving up lewd fan art.

I was offered âoesee through challengeâ videos on YouTube on an account I almost exclusively use for watching news and politics.

anyone letting their kids loose on YouTube that young is courting disaster.

That is because actual scientists are NOT surprised by this stuff.

Pop sci pubs need to make the story look ground breaking, so they take genuine advancement of knowledge and exaggerate it for dramatic effect.

I know several scientists who have been interviewed by the press, and not one of them has felt like the article accurately reflected what they said, or how the writer told them they planned on describing it. Often 6-8 hours of discussion gets cut down to one quote, taken out of context, and used in such a way as to imply something they never said, or even to contradict what they did say.

As a general rule, experts in any field are better informed than the layperson. If an article creates the opposite impression, then that is usually by deliberate and malicious design of the articles author. I have no patience for this kind of bullshit, and neither should you.