One of the most common questions I get from SquintMom readers is along the lines of is item/substance/compound XYZ toxic? I’d like to go ahead and answer this once and for all: YES, it is. Now let me explain what I mean, and how I can answer this very generic question in a catch-all way…
Megavitamin therapy is the use of very large doses of vitamins to prevent or treat illness or some symptom thereof. While not the first major proponent of megavitamin therapy, Linus Pauling is perhaps the best known; he advocated using huge doses of vitamin C (many grams per day) to treat and prevent disease. As a…
I wanted to follow up last week’s post on DHA supplementation with a look into the research on fish oil supplementation, since while fish oil is a common source of supplemental DHA, there are supplements that contain pure DHA (as opposed to the normal mix of fats present in fish oil). While I concluded that…
**This article addresses the science associated with DHA supplements, not fish oil capsules. DHA is a component of fish oil, but fish oil contains other components as well, and is addressed in another article on this site** We live in a supplement-obsessed culture. Otherwise healthy men and women take multivitamins as “insurance” against nutritional…
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) acknowledges that breast milk is the gold standard in infant nutrition, but nevertheless recommends supplementing all infants — formula- or breastfed — with a daily dose of 400 IU of vitamin D. Two things about this mystify me. First, the implication that human milk is universally low in vitamin…
