[Vitamins: nutriments and drugs, their frontier]

Current food of french normal subjects is sufficient and even surpasses the caloric recommended apport. Though repartition between glucids, protids and lipids is not ideal, the recommended daily apports (RDA) for vitamins are satisfied at a 75-80% level in spite of some exceptions (vitamins B1, D, folates). For this reason, every vitamin complementation must be moderate. The National Academy of Medicine has logically recommended ("wish" of the 20th of June 1989) to limit this complementation at the level of the vitaminic fraction probably lost by caloric restriction. In the french present situation, it would be limited at 0.5 RDA and well balanced for all vitamins without any exception. This is related to nutritional concept and is not a drug. On the contrary, all particular or "risk" situations may demand more concentrated, eventually not balanced formulas or isolated vitamins at varied doses. These are drugs because they are without efficiency if not adapted, often useless or perhaps long term dangerous. Therefore, the proposed frontier between nutriment and drug is not based on always controversial definitions but on their real nature allowing further adaptation to habits and knowledge.