My dad has been always against the supplements: "It's okay you take them regularly all the time, but the trouble comes when you stop taking any." His theory is based on the balance--taking supplements would increase your body's needs for those vitamins or minerals. You feed your body by taking supplements and it's satisfied. Once you stop, your body would be hunger for all those stuff and surely you'll suffer.

I was greatly affected by my dad's thinking but I couldn't take it into actions. If you are a graduate student like me, you might get yourself bombed by endless readings, assignments, presentations, and whatever tasks and jobs you could think of. The direct results of those things are that you have no time to do exercise, you have no time to hang out with buddies, and the worse thing might be that you even don't have time to cook(though I suffer a lot from fridgemania)! That's the way I live. That's also why I need Centrum or Spirulina or some other supplements in fear of being innutrient.

Here comes the bad news. A study by University of Nis, Serbia and Montenegro points out that antioxidant vitamin supplements might increase overall risk of death. It's not that bad that only 9,000 out of one million might die prematurely. Wait, that means almost one in one hundred will die earlier?!

The risk of death was 30 percent higher for people taking beta-carotene and vitamin A than for those not taking the combination. In the case of people taking beta-carotene and vitamin E, relative risk was raised by 10 percent.

Surely the study needs more repetitions and verifications to give people better directions on taking vitamin supplements. But it did ring a alarm bell to all of us who count our health on supplements instead of good living habits, active exercises and healthy food. I'm just writing this to keep it in my mind, and for all my friends.