"em" wrote:

What about vitamin C and all that other stuff? What I lernt in the 60's, in
grade school, was that if you didn't get vitamin C, you would get scurvy.

Yet folks who eat fresh raw or undercooked meat don't get scurvy.
That means meat has C in it until cooked. If you wanna eat raw
seal eyeballs, you won't get scurvy either.

I've really been wondering about what I get from my diet vs. what I really
need to have. Now that I've added melons to my diet, and plan to up the
berries a little bit, in addition to the veggies, I'm not so sure I need
supplements.

Agreed. But I take them anyways. I have a different reason
for doing it - Belt and suspenders. Modern argiculture only
puts the minerals into the soil that are needed to grow the
crops, so the foods I eat might or might not have the expected
minerals. Selective breeding is for yield and transportability, so
the foods I eat might or might not have the expected vitamins.
So I take supplements to be sure.

I also take specific supplements based on my age and family
medical history.

I hate taking those things because (for one thing) the way the
ingredients are balanced. Taking a thousand percent of the RDA of most
things, and 3% of other things, just doesn't make sense.

Good for you for noticing and thinking it over.

Why can't they just make a pill with 100% of everything??

1) That's Centrum's claim to fame. They keep retuning their
formula based on the latest science. But they assume 100%
is the right amount. It's actually what it takes to be sure you
won't get a deficiency - Great for my case of belt and suspenders
but not for someone likely to have a deficiency.

2) Certain nutrients like iron and vitamin D have overdose levels
within ten times their theraputic dose levels, so tablets are sold
without them.

3) Certain nutrients like C and calcium have such large theraputic
doses that a pill with them all would be huge. So I take a regular
multi, plus C, plus cal/mag.

4) Certain nutrients are liquid while others are powder. So I take
fish oil separately.

5) No one actually knows what "everything" really is. There hasn't
been an essential nutrient discovered in a while but the list might
not be complete yet. But there's more to nutrition than essential.

Oh, another question: are melons fruits or another class of foods? I've
never thought of watermelon as a fruit, for example, but it has seeds, no?

The class of melons is a subset of the class of fruits. Same as -
The class of berries is a subset of the class of fruits.