Vitamins

Ward Patrick, personal trainer, retired marine

My husband Chris and I recently visited my cousin and her husband in Austin.  She is in a nutrition graduate program, and Chris mentioned to her that I've been reading about and trying various supplementation regimens for weight training.  She mentioned a quite pointer on vitamin supplementation that has helped me alter when and how I take which vitamins.

Vitamins can be classified as water- or fat-soluble.  As the classifications imply, these vitamins are absorbed by the body by combination with water or fats, but they are also retained differently.

 Water-soluble vitamins must be consumed with water in order for the body to absorb them during digestion.  This is not a hard thing to come by in my diet, as I drink a lot water throughout the day.  However, it is also important to note that water-soluble vitamins are not stored by the body; upon digestion, these vitamins are transferred to the bloodstream and distributed throughout the body, they are then immediately filtered out of the blood by the kidneys and passed out of the body in urine.  This is why you "piss gold" after taking a multivitamin--it's all the water-soluble vitamins exiting the body.

Water-Soluble Vitamins

B and C

As the name implies, fat-soluble vitamins must be consumed with fats in order for the body to absorb them.  This bit of knowledge has changed my vitamin supplementation timing slightly.  I used to take a vitamin C & E supplement immediately after training with my post-workout shake.  That's fine for the vitamin C, which is water soluble, but its a waste for the vitamin E, which must dissolve in fats in order to be absorbed by the body.  I usually avoid fats for an hour or so after training in order to not slow down my digestion of the protein and carbs I take postworkout.  So now I've cut out the vitamin E supplementation immediately after working out and delayed it to until my first postworkout meal, in which I always try to include good fats.

But there's more.  Unlike water-soluble vitamins, fat-soluble vitamins are stored in the body in the liver for several days.  For people like me who supplement their normal diet with additional fat-soluble vitamins, there is a chance of over-supplementation.  It is possible to saturate the liver with too much of one or more fat-soluble vitamins, leading to various liver conditions.  So be careful.  My takeaway from this is to follow the vitamin supplementation amounts recommended by sports medicine experts (see the excellent book Nutrition Timing), and to be careful to reduce or stop supplementation with fat-soluble vitamins when I am taking time off from training.

Fat-Soluble Vitamins

A, D, E, and K