alt Hacker NewsYour body needs vitamins in order to form complex aminos to operate. But your body only needs to make so many of them - especially if you are an adult, not pregnant, or not suffering from a disease of some sort.
The very premise that loading up your body with "excess" vitamins beyond what you need is already pretty fraught. Building a house without enough lumber can lead to long term deficiency - but loading up a construction site with more materials than are needed shouldn't automatically be assumed to be good.
The reality is that the modern diet has already solved so many common nutrient deficiency diseases (pellagra and goiters were a shockingly common diseases 100 years ago) that maxing out on vitamin intake has become more of something like a speculative hobby than anything else.
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Most vitamins are a cofactor for enzymes like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiamine#Biological_functions
Vitamin D is not but rather it regulates calcium and phosphorous metabolism.
There would still be a ton of goiters if not for iodized salt, basically an obligatory vitamin intake. People had no good iodine source living inland where most anything they catch or grow is not going to have sufficient iodine no matter what it is they were eating.
I'm not sure what the ancestral iodine source might have been. Fishing villages perhaps along the coast? Hard to say how much coast was relatively populated given challenges of shifting shorelines and archaeological efforts. You can still reproduce laden with a goiter however, and that is enough to keep chucking malnourished humans somewhere on earth.
Depends on which vitamin as well. Some like vitamin B and C aren't retained, so excess is shed quickly.
These days it is same with protein... Too much protein fads.
Vitamin D deficiency entered the chat. It's a relatively common issue in many countries.
> loading up a construction site with more materials than are needed shouldn't automatically be assumed to be good
It is almost universally recognized as good to do exactly that. It's better to have one planned extra trip to return excess materials (if they can't be used on the next job) than to have multiple unplanned trips when you unexpectedly run out of this or that.