When I was in high school, my mom used to give me these multivitamins from the health food store. They were called PowerTeens and they had a kid skateboarding on the bottle so you knew they worked. I didn’t like taking them because a.) they were huge, b.) they tasted like citric acid being passed through a lead pipe, and c.) they made my pee neon yellow. Which, in hindsight, is the least bad side-effect I’ve ever heard of but when I was 14 or however old I was, it was ALARMING.
I remember making my friends take one each once and asking them to go into the bathroom and see what happened and they all experienced the same thing. Given this extremely scientific research conducted at the accredited lab of the South Eugene High School restrooms, I concluded that a high dose of vitamins, specifically B-vitamins, would take regular human urine and turn it into Gatorade.
This is why, when I read about “megavitamin therapy” — a popular treatment in the 1930s and 40s which is definitely exists on the Spectrum of Quackery — all I could think was that a lot of people probably had a lot of odd moments in the lav.
Megavitamin Therapy: A Quick History
Maybe your mother handed you small cups filled with unusually-shaped (and always excessively large) cups for your health. Maybe she just gave you a chewable vitamin C tablet when you began to sniffle. Whatever treatment you got during cold and flu season, it was probably at least in part backed by the idea megavitamin therapy.
In the 1930s, a bacteriologist named Claus W. Jungeblut (dope name) reported that he’d had some success with experiments wherein he pumped people monkeys with diseases full of vitamin C in various ways. He didn’t say that C actually cured them, but he did believe it could help stem infection and that it seemed to render the diseases, while still in the Petri dish, inactive. Which isn’t that surprising since I’m pretty sure most bacteria and viruses can survive a sudden billion percent spike in pH. But!
This was curious enough that other doctors began to try to emulate his findings and figure out what else could be “cured” (again, no one was cured) by large doses of vitamins. And it was interesting enough, as reported by the press, anyway, to make people think that maybe vitamins could do wonders for general health.
Unfortunately for generations of monkeys, guinea pigs, rabbits, and human test subjects, there’s been no research to conclusively link dosing of vitamin C (in a large or a regular quantity) to suppressing the cold. However! The research scientists who took the megavitamin therapy idea and ran with it couldn’t be stopped there.
He was absolutely not alone. Vitamins were about to get like, so hot.
Vitamins were truly isolated and labeled in the 1930s. That’s also when scurvy was identified as an acute deficiency of vitamin C (ascorbic acid), which made the entire thing feel like kind of a miracle. There are amazing little drugs hiding in our food and they can cure us. They can cure scurvy. They can cure the cold maybe? (Aside: No.)
So like, maybe you could cure other things with vitamins?
Naturally, doctors were trying astronomical doses of vitamins on literally everyone and for everything, especially since vitamin marketers were starting to make the rounds. And of course, people under psychiatric care were some of the first to get these treatments because nothing else was really working and why not. Vitamins were becoming a popular new treatment — they were easy to get and had been relatively recently isolated which meant there was a lot of potential research on the horizon. There was also a lot of suspicion at this time that these still-newly-discovered vitamins, which were in everything but had never really been identified clearly, could explain the way people were.
Maybe they had too many vitamins? Or too few? Maybe diseases like schizophrenia were just vitamin deficiencies? Maybe let’s just try to treat literally anything with these new (and newly-cheap!) compounds?
Enter: Megavitamin Therapy for people with mental health conditions
Dr. Abram Hoffer, a Canadian biochemist, spent years trying to treat schizophrenia, substance use disorder, and other mental health disorders. He was pretty experimental — using LSD, nutritional interventions, and absolutely humongous doses of vitamins on his patients. Dr. Hoffer revered by some and condemned by others, but it didn’t seem to stop him.
He published numerous papers reporting his findings that treating patients who experience psychosis in conventional ways (therapy, regular meds, ECT at the time), cutting what he deemed to be “junk food,” and adding massive doses of vitamins, like niacin (vitamin B-3), would “improve the recovery rate over standard therapy alone.”
From his 1975 paper:
“There are several etiologies for the schizophrenia syndrome. It is suggested that these include Vitamin B-3 and B-6 dependency, mineral deficiency, particularly zinc, and cerebral reactions (termed allergy). The treatment based upon these ideas includes good nutrition (junk-free diet), megadoses of some vitamins, minerals, attention to certain foods which produce psychosis in a few; all in a judicious combination with standard psychiatric therapy.”
He was clear that you couldn’t just swallow vitamin B-3 at home and hope to get cured. In his research, Dr. Hoffer stated that while Vitamin B-3 alone did not help most chronic patients…Vitamin B-3 did double recovery rates of acute and subacute cases when added to standard treatment.”
But like, even that’s a pretty big claim — especially when Hoffer predicted that enriching food with B-3 “will prevent most cases of pellagra or of schizophrenia from becoming manifest. I estimate that one gram per day started early in life will protect most of us.” Along with his other megavitamin practitioners, he carried the idea that somehow B-3 was a kind of brain pill, one that could fix psychosis and silence the voices and even maybe just make everyone feel a little better.
There were few significant or salient results. The “research” being conducted was almost never able to be emulated, and the doctors in charge made a lot of excuses as to why they were pulling an Elizabeth Holmes on the world. People were still going through the rotating door of mental-health-to-hospital-to-jail.
But it didn’t matter. You’ve met people, haven’t you? And you know how much they care about, like, facts? The horses were out of the barn and the idea that vitamins just could cure you from all kinds of things had gotten very, very popular.
After all, a lot of people weren’t eating real well during the 1930s and 1940s and many of those health effects continued well into the next several decades. There was a desire and a market there. Which meant, of course, there was doing to be a new industry, too. Like people who, you know, could make a lot of money selling vitamins.
Advertisers began paying doctors and pharmacists to further the idea that vitamins could actively cure disease and improve people’s lives. Specifically, claims about vitamin B and its impact on “nerves” was a popular one. Articles written by paid doctors were syndicated from coast to coast, ensuring that every grocery shopping lady in America knew that if she was feeling depressed, anxious, or mentally foggy, it was probably because she hadn’t had her daily dose of enriched foods.
In her iconic 1988 paper, "They Need it Now": Science, Advertising and Vitamins, 1925-1940, Rima Apple wrote about the way that vitamin advertising became a huge business pretty much immediately after vitamins were identified and commodified. Vitamins were an immediate hit with consumers who were looking for ways to not only improve their physical health, but to outrun the damage of aging. Later, in her book Vitamania, she noted that both returning soldiers and factory workers began taking vitamins in the pursuit of productivity and wakefulness — and that they served as a kind of ~ influencer group ~ to those around them, encouraging them to take vitamins at home, too.
Hoffer wasn’t the only doc using B-3 and other vitamins, and he certainly wasn’t the only one shilling for their inclusion in every single food — in absolutely massive doses that we now know are too huge for the human body to even utilize or metabolize and that pretty much all end up down the literal toilet — but he was one the one who was the subject of a whole task force from the American Psychiatric Association in 1973.
Controversy!
As the APA Task Force on Vitamin Therapy in Psychiatry reported in 1973, the popularity of megavitamin dosing, especially in cognitive treatments, was getting…big. And they were concerned because there were a lot of claims and didn’t seem to be that much in the way of proof. Additionally, they were concerned that Hoffer’s initial idea — supplementing ECT and other therapies with vitamin B-3 — had become “a school of nutritional thought which employs conventional somatic treatments but adds on large doses of single or multiple vitamins often in combination with minerals, hormones, and special diets.”
This, they determined, was neither scientific nor safe. The methodologies seemed unclear and, instead of looking to disprove their own theories, the purveyors of Big Vitamin were only looking to confirm what they wanted to believe.
“Results claimed by advocates of megavitamin therapy were initially modest and supported by their own published data,” wrote the Task Force. “More recently they have tended to become categorical statements which are offered without systematic documentation.”
Additionally, the letter brought up concerns of safety, since this kind of treatment often resulted in doctors pushing vitamins over other forms of therapy.
The APA Task Force also found that the hype was putting providers in a bind.
“…In most of the publications the virtues of the megavitamin approach have been lauded by the proponents while the psychiatric profession has been severely criticized for its failure to accept their principles and practice,” they noted.
The APA Task Force also made clear that they were not trying to dissuade research. Instead, they wanted studies that were well-documented and executed responsibly.
“Should the claims supporting megavitamin treatment be incorrect or lacking in substance, the tragic consequences of advocacy of an ineffective treatment follow,” they wrote, confidently stating that if they vitamins worked, doctors would use them. They just needed proof — and training, and strict protocols.
They weren’t entirely critical, though. At one point, the report states that there might be some benefit because “socially desirable outcomes have sometimes been derived from myths or fervently held beliefs…To this extent the orthomolecular movement in psychiatry may be socially useful.” Yowza! I love it when the scientists get spicy.
The APA left very little in the way of ambiguity, though. Their report all but underscores the idea that vitamin-B is neither a prevention nor a cure for schizophrenia.
“The analysis of the data continues,” they concluded, “but none of [the] findings encourage the expectation that vitamin B is an effective treatment for the great mass of schizophrenics who are hospitalized for this disorder.”
This is stopped precisely no one for trying to take vitamins to improve their brains. One time I went on a date with a guy who told me he was taking Alzheimer’s medications off-label to “super-charge” his intelligence (reader, it did not work). And the vitamin industry remains a billion-dollar money-printing machine, taking money off of consumers without even the slightest whiff of apprehension (or, for that matter, regulation). I’m pretty sure if there was a meme tomorrow on Facebook that said vitamin B could cure anxiety, there would be a run on the stuff, even in the complete absence of data.
Do I still take my vitamins every day? Yeah of course because I, too, am willing to drop my honest American dollars on things that allegedly will make me feel better. But the ones I take now don’t make my pee look like lemon sorbet, so I’ve got that going for me.