Project Summary: >> As a nation, we spend three quarters of a billion pounds a year on vitamin supplements, and no matter who you are or what you're worried about, there's a pill for you. We've got pills for teenagers, pills for women, men, and pills for different parts of your body. We've got here for vision and eye health; skin, hair, and nails; and pills for your heart. [Background Music] Now, vitamins and some minerals are genuinely vital to our bodies, but the key question is, does taking them in supplement pills do us any good? I'm going to do a little experiment on myself to find out. We normally get our vitamins from our diet, so my first step is to fess up to everything I've eaten and drunk over the past week. I started with breakfast, and I eat good breakfast, you know, I've got porridge oats and Weetabix, so I'll lay them out. I'm pretty good for lunch. Usually have tomatoes, and I get a salad chicken baguette of some sort. So far, so good. But then, I remembered more. It's hardly what you'd call a virtuous diet, but like with most people's diets, it's surprising how many vitamins are actually hidden in there. Starting the day with the breakfast cereals, fortified with B vitamins. [ Music ] Right the way through to late night crisps and fries, which, when fried quickly, actually preserves the high levels of vitamin C in potatoes. So, I'm a normal person eating a pretty normal diet. So if I were to take a supplement, would it in fact do me any good? Well, I'm going to take one and find out. The pill I've taken is a typical multivitamin containing high doses of most of the vitamins, especially vitamin C, which is the most popular single vitamin supplement sold. As a nation, we take about 600 million tablets of pure vitamin C every year, and a lot more in multivitamins. [ Music ] To see if it's doing me any good, I took a sample of my blood from before the pill to measure the amount of vitamin C in my body from my diet. Now, to see what happens to the supplement I've taken, I'm collecting all my urine for 24 hours as a lovely present for a team here at the University of East Anglia, led by Professor Bill Fraizer. Bill, 24 hours of pee. Bill's team get to work analyzing my body fluids. They start with the vitamin levels in my blood before I took the pill. This will reveal how much vitamin C I was getting just from my normal food and drink. So, Bill, have I got scurvy? >> No, you've not got scurvy. >> That's a relief. I didn't think I had. >> I'm pleased to say that you're not vitamin C deficient. >> So, before I even took the pill, my normal diet was providing me with all the vitamin C my body needed. But what happened when I tried to top it up with a supplement? How much of the vitamin in the pill would remain in my body, and how much would pass straight through? >> From the tablet, we extracted about 425 mg. Your urine contained over 530 mg of vitamin C, so you've passed the tablet and a little bit more, which is probably what you've taken in in your diet. >> Basically my body was full of as much vitamin C as it can hold, and anything else I put in I just peed out. >> You've peed it out. The majority of it's been peed out. Yep. >> It's tempting to think that if vitamins and minerals are good for you, then taking more must be better, but that's just not the case. A recent study by the Food Standards Agency showed that the average Brit was getting all their recommended daily allowance of every dietary vitamin from their food, and once you have enough, taking more vitamins won't give you a bonus boost. Some can even be dangerous. There are a few clear cases where vitamin or mineral supplements can be beneficial, such as for young children, strict vegetarians, post-menopausal women, or a few other groups where doctors have recommended it. People with severe illnesses, people who might be pregnant, people with absorptive or digestive problems. The rest of us are victims of really clever, aggressive marketing, and we should stop wasting our money. That's the transcript of the video above. After viewing the Video, provide 1 paragraph on the pros of taking a vitamin supplement and one paragraph on the cons.