 I'm sure most of you are familiar with the term, lift heavy and take a multi-bro. And across general health, conventional wisdom, what everyone thinks, multi-vitamins are viewed as an end-all-be-all solution. But let's be honest here, do you genuinely think taking a tablet the size of your fingernail can give you all the nutrition your body needs in a day? If you guys want to learn more about this and what vitamins I personally take, you can go to my Amazon shop, Amazon.com slash Frank Tafano, or sign up for my Patreon where I'm going to do a video where I literally show you guys what I take every day from a vitamin and mineral perspective. First off, the forms of the vitamins and minerals in multi-vitamins aren't necessarily bioavailable. And even if they are, they're likely not in the correct natural ratios in the vitamin. By bioavailable, we mean, are they actually getting absorbed? That being said, the majority of diets are so poor that most people might actually benefit from some of the nutrients in a multivitamin. All of these multivitamins are pretty generic. They all use the same ingredients, similar amounts, similar ratios, and this makes sense as the nutrients in food for the most part are very well known. But that's just paper value, again, not what's necessarily absorbed in the body. Paper value versus true bioavailability is what needs to be figured out here. Beta-carotene versus retinolic acid are two different forms of vitamin A. Vitamin K1 versus vitamin K2 are two very different things. I wouldn't even want to consider them the same vitamin. So vitamins typically have the animal versus the plant form, whereas minerals have different chelations. Yes, there is a natural chelation that occurs in meat that occurs in vegetable foods, but most of the supplements are maybe occurring in nature or something made in a laboratory. Magnesium oxide versus glycanid, for instance. Magnesium bound to oxygen versus magnesium bound to glycine. Two different absorption rates, and they affect your body, especially digestion, very differently. Since we know there are certain vitamins, minerals, and fatty acids our body needs, it's a matter of identifying the correct amounts and sources in order to achieve optimal health. And it's not necessarily about adding more. A lot of the time it's about removing and balancing and fix past errors due to modern dieting. Fortunately, we can look to wild animal and plant foods and see nutrients occurring in those proper ratios. If you're going to supplement something, you want to identify what's lacking in your diet and address the nutrient you're missing. You don't want to just blanket supplement everything. It doesn't make sense to take a multivitamin when you're just deficient in a few things. Maybe you're only deficient in copper. And you don't have to go far to see that these vitamins aren't working. Many reviews online with people talking about how they got sick after just taking one multivitamin. One thing we can't overlook is that some of these forms of vitamins are harmful because they're not naturally occurring or because they were processed with certain chemicals from a polluted source. Maybe it's too high of an amount of a certain nutrient. To address toxicity of certain nutrients on an individual basis is time consuming, very difficult, and maybe I'll do that in a future video. So I'm going to go over each of these nutrients that occur in the multivitamins and explain my thoughts based on my current nutritional knowledge, which I believe is a step above all the other punks on YouTube. So this multivitamin is centrum. So shout out to the boys at Centrum that are making people sick. And listen, part of this is profit. Part of the reason they use certain forms of the nutrients is just to make money. It's cheap. It's fillers. And another aspect is they're just trying to check off the RDAs. And the RDAs aren't necessarily correct. So if you're basing a multivitamin off of the recommended dietary allowances which aren't correct in the first place, what are you doing? A lot of this really is just them trying to look good on paper. Oh, it has 100% of your iodine, 100% of your zinc, 100% of, you know, it's all BS. It really is all BS. So the vitamin A is in the form of beta-carotene and I believe retinal pomatate. So it's a processed chemical, you know, who knows what solvents and things they're using to make it. Plus, most people have too much vitamin A in their diet. So you're getting too much of something you don't need that likely has some negative chemicals that are causing oxidative stress. Vitamin C is also made from a highly processed powder. This is in the form of ascorbic acid. You guys want to know why you shouldn't consume ascorbic acid and why you should opt for whole food vitamin C. I did a video on vitamin C I think two or three weeks ago. Vitamin D3 is in the correct form called calciferol that you would supplement except it needs to be really high dose to fix the deficiency. Humans can synthesize tens of thousands of IU of vitamin D per day. You need to take 9, 10,000 IU of vitamin D every day for a few months just to correct the deficiency. So again, 1000 IU way too low. But according to the RDAs, it's adequate. RDAs aren't here to keep anyone healthy. If anything, they're just making people sick. So vitamin E is present in food to prevent the oxidation of fat. So if you consume it separately, you're basically consuming oxidized fat. It's not necessary whatsoever. Should not be supplemented. Vitamin K here is in the form of vitamin K1. Ideally, you have vitamin K2. Well, not ideally. You really need vitamin K2. Vitamin K2 is synthesized by the gut. And if you're looking for a supplement, you want vitamin K2 in the form of Mk4. I did a whole video on that why you want vitamin K2 in the form Mk4. So the B vitamins are all made from agrochemical, laden waste in many cases. All of these from vitamin K downward. And some forms of B vitamins like folate and B12 aren't in their available form because it's cheaper to use certain forms in supplements. And some of these, especially vitamin B6, can cause toxicity very quickly. If you want to test if you're deficient in B vitamins, what I would do is get a high quality B complex. And I'll show you guys this in my Patreon video. And you could take that for a week or two or three. Because what ends up happening is you take a multivitamin. It has all this other crap in it. And you're not sure if you're deficient in B vitamins. So when you get a high dose B complex, you just get a lot of B vitamins all at once. They're water soluble. You only have to take it for a week or two. And don't think that just because you're on a carnivore diet that you're not deficient in B vitamins, a lot of people have malabsorption issues. And muscle meat isn't actually that high in certain B vitamins. So moving on to calcium. And the calcium RDA is really high. And I think there's two reasons for that. One could be that they just want to make people really sick and cause people to have calcification in all of their tissues. That's a very likely possibility. And the other reason could be that we're deficient in vitamin D, 3 and K2, which regulates calcium. So they do studies and research and people with osteoporosis and see that not a lot of calcium is in the bones. So they think they can just pummel people with calcium. But that's not how the body works. You need vitamin D and vitamin K2 to mobilize calcium. So you do not need to take calcium in excess. Same thing with iron. People are overloaded with iron in their livers. It's just not being utilized due to a lack of copper to regulate. I don't know why I didn't write iron down on here. There's actually 18 milligrams of iron in this multivitamin and we'll talk about that being a problem later. So iodine is good to supplement or get from fish. Probably the only reasonably safe thing in here. Although you definitely need to up the dose because of modern halogens like bromide, chlorine and fluoride in the water supply. The magnesium they use is in the form of magnesium oxide, which has very low if no bioavailability and tends to cause stomach problems. Plus the dose of magnesium needs to be much higher. Some people have to take 5, 6, 7, 800, 1,000 milligrams of magnesium per day before they start feeling better. Zinc should never be supplemented as zinc to copper ratio is very delicate and needs to be addressed carefully. Selenium is good to supplement on occasion. Not sure of the form they use in this supplement. But 55 micrograms per day is bordering on toxic levels for some people if used over a long period of time. A half a milligram of copper in the form copper sulfate is not actually bad. The amount just needs to be much higher and in a more bioavailable form. And the rest of these minerals here aren't significant and would be obtained in trace amounts in your diet. And there's even other trace elements that some people argue you need to supplement. But it's really a lot of the time just to make money. This multivitamin is a nightmare when you consider the metabolic pathways towards iron overload. And iron overload starts in the womb, in prenatal periods, in early childhood. Babies are born with excess iron in their livers and don't have enough copper to mobilize the iron. In order to utilize iron in your body, you need copper and vitamin A. Most people have enough vitamin A but they aren't getting enough copper. And we need four to eight milligrams of copper per day to function optimally. And the copper to zinc ratio in the diet is supposed to be around one to eight. This supplement only has 0.5 milligrams of copper. And the vitamin has incredibly high amounts of iron at 18 milligrams, which is gonna cancel out the copper in it, if anything make it worse. And the zinc to copper ratio is incorrect. This is like a 22 to 1 zinc to copper ratio. It almost seems as if these people are trying to create a multivitamin that gives you iron overload. It's literally formulated in a way to cause iron overload. As you can imagine, getting that much copper in zinc that you actually need from natural foods requires a very high quality nutrient dense diet. Now when people don't follow that the majority of their lives, the iron stays tight up in their liver and they don't develop as optimally as they should. Your liver gets clogged up with all of this excess vitamin A, retinol as well as iron until you get adequate copper to move the iron where it's supposed to go. The most important thing to understand is when you add something in your diet, there is almost always some form of negative. Even with the healthy food, your body is using enzymes and energy to digest it. So when you start adding dozens of different synthetic molecules and agrochemical patterns, there should be justification for doing so, not just trying to cover all of your bases by taking everything. So you guys can see some of my vitamin recommendations on my Amazon shop, as I mentioned earlier, Amazon.com slash shop slash Frank Defano. And I think I'm sold out of most things on organ supplements, but you guys can still grab iodine and the full spectrum organ supplement, which will have a balanced amount of vitamins and minerals. Most people should be supplementing with copper, magnesium, vitamin K2, possibly D3, then a few other things depending on lifestyle factors. And in a perfect world with a perfect diet, you wouldn't need to supplement. But at least temporarily when you're starting your health exploration is necessary for most people. So if you guys do want to reach out to me for one-on-one consultations, I can help you with your diet, your supplementing routine, whatever you would like advisement on. You guys can support me through the other means down in the comments below. I'll link everything in the description of the video. So thank you guys for joining me today. We're gonna do a live stream later on the channel Frank to Fano. I'll probably talk mostly about nutrition at 8 p.m. Eastern time. See you guys there.