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Canadian study finds vitamin drinks not so useful

Making sense of hydration.

supplement vitamin drugs pillsGuzzling back vitamin drinks and energy drinks  may not be doing very much for you.

A new study, published this month and conducted at the University of Toronto has found that most drinks marketed as being beneficial for you health generally aren’t actually good for you.

The research looked at 46 different drinks which were marketed as energy drinks and vitamin-fortified beverages or juices. They compared marketing on the labels to nutritional information at two different points in time, once before and once after new regulations on beverage marketing came into effect.

A closer look found that most of the vitamins in these drinks are not really ones which are particularly lacking in a regular diet, and some are so infused with them that it may even be harmful. A lot of the drinks has levels of B6 and B11 triple the recommended daily dose.

“It’s very hard to figure out the logic the manufacturers are using to do this fortification,” Valerie Tarasuk, the lead author of the study, told the New York Times. “There’s no way that the things that are being added are things that anybody needs or stands to benefit from.”

The study was published in the Applied Physiology, Nutrition, and Metabolism.

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