Gabe Mirkin, M.D.
Several years ago a major drug company claimed that its
vitamin pills helped to relieve stress from the "complications of
everyday life" and gave their products names such as
"StressTabs." The New York Attorney General forced them to
stop their deceptive advertising, but many people still remember
and believe this claim.
There is no evidence that stress
increases your needs for vitamins or that taking vitamins will help
you handle stress. When you eat vitamins in pills or in your food,
they go into your bloodstream and then into cells. They function
by combining with other chemicals in cells called apoenzymes, to
form complete enzymes that cause reactions to proceed in your
body. All chemical reactions in your body require enzymes to
make them go, and that is why vitamins are essential. For
example, all of the B vitamins form enzymes that convert food to
energy. But since enzymes only start chemical reactions and are
not used up by them, they can be used over and over again and
only minuscule amounts are needed from your diet.
In the 1930's, Hans Selye of McGill University in
Montreal reported that the adrenal glands contain the highest
concentration in the body of vitamin C. The adrenal glands make
cortisol from vitamin C. When a person is under stress, the
adrenal glands make tremendous amounts of cortisol and the
concentration of vitamin C in them drops. However, scientists
have known for more than forty years that the levels of vitamin C
in the adrenal glands are still high enough to continue to produce
cortisol and that giving extra vitamin C will not increase
production of cortisol. So the myth that vitamins treat stress is
based on a misinterpretation of one study on one vitamin, and
that research did not show that taking extra vitamins prevents
stress.