Vitamin B12 Megadose – Is More Always Better?
“Extreme vitamin B12 – extra high dose!” This is how some manufacturers advertise their vitamin B12 products. Yet are such high doses of the vitamin genuinely useful?
Vitamin B12 is a healthy and vital vitamin, which benefits the body in many ways. This sometimes leads people to believe that the more they consume, the healthier they will become; a sentiment that is only true to a very limited extent. If optimal doses are exceeded, vitamins can upset the body’s sensitive balance and overburden the excretory organs.
To this end, megadoses of vitamin B12 should be criticised: they are unnecessarily high for meeting the body’s requirement. But are there any instances where this kind of B12 dosage can be helpful?
Profile: Megadoses of Vitamin B12
Megadoses can be useful in the following circumstances:
- In initial therapy to replenish the body’s store of vitamin B12 when taken for a limited period of time only
- When applied as a therapeutic agent for combating toxicity and nervous diseases
To cover the daily requirement and for general deficiency prevention, such quantities of B12 do not make sense.
Vitamin B12 Overdose: Is There a Risk?
Vitamin B12 is not toxic; doses well over 5000 µg have shown no negative side effects. Although there are no findings on the effects of a long-term intake, there are no known health risks of megadoses due to the fact that any unused vitamin B12 is simply excreted.
Nevertheless, smaller doses are more than sufficient for all common areas of application. In our opinion, megadoses are only really useful in therapeutic applications.
