yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Can You Overdose on Vitamins?


3m read
·Nov 10, 2024

If you eat just one carrot every day, that provides all the vitamin A you need to survive. But in some parts of the world, that's not easy to come by. There are an estimated 250 million preschool-aged children who are vitamin A deficient. Most of them are in Africa and Southeast Asia, like here in India. Of those, about 250,000 to 500,000 are severely vitamin A deficient.

When that happens, they get night blindness, which means as the Sun goes down they lose their ability to see. Now if you catch the condition at that point, and give a child just a few high-dose vitamin A supplements, their sight can be restored within 24 to 48 hours. It's like a miracle cure. But if you don't, well, the condition can continue to worsen until they're completely blind. And of those children who are completely blind, roughly half die in the following 12 months.

These are all things I learned while working on a new feature-length 90-minute documentary called "Vitamania", all about these sense and nonsense of vitamins. And I am not only the presenter of this documentary, I'm also one of the co-executive producers. And you can watch this documentary right now. It is live, on the web, for everywhere in the world except France and Germany because it's coming to your TVs.

But I will put a link to it, "Vitamania the Movie", in the description and right here. And I want to show you a trailer for this film, so you get a sense of what it looks like, what it's all about. It's something I've been working on for two and a half years, so I'm really proud of it, and I just want you to go and check it out. So here is the trailer.

In 1913, Antarctic explorers Douglas Mawson and Xavier Mertz were fighting for their lives. With most of their food gone, they faced a stark choice: eat their dogs, or die. [MUSIC] After reluctantly eating their dogs, the men fell ill, burning with fever. Within days, Mertz was dead. Mawson, against the odds, made it back to camp.

So what was the mystery illness that killed Mertz, and nearly cost Mawson his life? Well, when they ate their dogs, they weren't just eating canine flesh and fat. They also ate the dog's livers, which contain high levels of vitamin A. So basically, they overdosed. It's a condition known as Hypervitaminosis A.

Hypervitaminosis A is rare but deadly, and today we know it can be caused by overuse of high-dose vitamin A supplements - the same kind of supplements that can save a child's sight. This power and complexity lies at the heart of the great vitamin story. [MUSIC]

I'm embarking on an epic world-spanning investigation of vitamin science and history. "Aargh!" "That is one big fish!" I want to know how we discovered them, “You sure this is safe?” what they actually are, “The 13 vitamins can be divided into two teams.” how we learnt to build them, “Tonight, Walgreens and Target have pulled the products nationwide-” and how safe they are. “All vitamins - all nutrients - they are toxic in high amounts."

“We've got to start taking these seriously, as we should with every chemical we put into our bodies.” I'm a scientist. I'm also a father, and I want to know, how do I do the best for my son. And one day, might he be taking vitamin pills to Mars? [ROCKET LAUNCHING]

Across the world, some experts claim that taking vitamins can be lifesavers, whereas others argue that it's just a waste of time or even dangerous. So how are we supposed to know whether to take them or not? [MUSIC]

So I hope you enjoyed that trailer. If you want to check out the film you can click right here or the link down in the description. I really hope you liked it. Let me know what you think in the comments below.

More Articles

View All
Creativity and Science, Coming Together | StarTalk
If you identify yourself as being only either creative or scientific, you’re doing yourself a big disservice. I mean, there’s a lot of brain cells in the human skull that are capable of all manner of analysis, creativity, deduction, inference. I think th…
Explorers Festival, Thursday June 15 | National Geographic
from a distance it always seems impossible. But impossible is just a place we haven’t been to yet. Impossible is what beckons us to go further, to explore. It calls us from the wild, lures us into the unknown, asks us to dig deeper, to look at things from…
Identifying the constant of proportionality from equation | 7th grade | Khan Academy
When you hear “constant of proportionality,” it can seem a little bit intimidating at first. It seems very technical, but as we’ll see, it’s a fairly intuitive concept, and we’ll do several examples. Hopefully, you’ll get a lot more comfortable with it. …
Worked example: Finding the formula of an ionic compound | AP Chemistry | Khan Academy
Let’s now see if we could come up with the chemical formula for the ionic compound calcium bromide. And like always, if you are inspired, pause the video and see if you could come up with it on your own. All right, so the convention is that we write the …
Ray Dalio: We're Already in Another Depression
So I was recently listening to a TED talk with Ray Dalio about the current state of the global economy, and I was really surprised that Ray was quite confident in the idea that we are in the start of another depression very similar to what we saw in 1929.…
The Inverse Leidenfrost Effect
Now you’ve probably heard of the Leidenfrost effect. That’s when a volatile droplet like water levitates over a hot surface because it’s floating on a little cushion of its own vapor. Here I’m gonna try to create the inverse Leidenfrost effect where we le…