Should You Take a Daily Complete Multivitamin?

"Take your vitamins!" It's a mantra we've heard since childhood, and undoubtedly some of the fuel behind the rapid growth of the nutritional supplement industry. Multivitamins alone are a four billion-dollar-a-year business. Recently, much of the dietary health product buzz has focused on the nutritional supplement of choice for children and adults alike: daily complete multivitamins. Multivitamin brands like Centrum tout not only the benefits of multivitamin supplements, but how scientifically advanced their products are. But nutritionists and scientists don't understand nearly as much about vitamin supplements as the makers of Centrum, One-A-Day, and other daily complete multivitamins would have you believe. Nor do they want you to know that, as we learn more about how the body absorbs and uses vitamins, evidence increasingly points to daily complete multivitamins being, for most people, merely a waste of money.

Before deciding to supplement your diet with a daily complete multivitamin regimen, there are three areas of multivitamin information to consider. The first pertains to whom specifically multivitamin supplements are a benefit, according to the latest research; the second, that there are little-understood differences between manufactured multivitamin supplements and natural vitamins that may be significant; the third, that taking medically-unsupervised daily complete multivitamins does carry some risks.

- Evidence suggests that most people don't benefit from daily complete multivitamins.

A bombshell in multivitamin supplement news has been the recent findings of a few studies--namely, that people taking a daily complete multivitamin as a nutritional supplement are no healthier than those who don't take one, nor do they live longer. This is particularly notable considering that even though daily complete multivitamin consumption has steadily risen in the U.S., so have the rates of all major diseases.