Multivitamins, many of us take them on a daily basis thinking we’re doing something good for our health – but are they actually good for us? Unfortunately, there is a now a lot of evidence to suggest that taking a daily multivitamin does very little to improve ones overall health and could actually be doing you more harm then good! How could this be…?

Well a large part of the problem lies with the difficulty of actually packing all the most important supplemental vitamins and minerals into one manageable daily pill. Manufacturers of multivitamins tend to include some of most commonly recommended vitamins and minerals that are needed in trace amounts in our diet and will all fit into one pill. Although some of the vitamins such as vitamin C and D are absolutely fine in the quantities supplied, other trace minerals such as Folic acid and Niacin are only needed in small amounts in the body and therefore it’s quite possible that once you include the amounts you are already getting in your food, you are exceeding the amount you should be taking on a daily basis.

Secondly, the tablets don’t include many of the most important vitamins and anti oxidants that we are missing from our modern diets as the amounts needed are far to big to include in one convenient pill.  For instance one of the most important vitamins you should be taking is Vitamin K2 but to actually get the required RDA into a tablet, you would need to take a tablet roughly the same size as your one a day multivitamin. Another very important daily supplement is magnesium but to get the 200 – 300 mg that you need daily, you probably need 2 to 3 large pills… The same goes for Vitamin D and your Omega 3 supplements, then of course there are your anti oxidants…

So in the end what gets put into a daily pill, is what will actually fit into a single small pill and is not necessarily what we actually need to supplement our modern processed foods diet. There have been several large studies over the years (such as Iowa Women’s health study) that have shown that people taking a multivitamin had no statistical health benefits when related to longevity or decreasing their risks from Cancer/heart attack etc. In fact woman who took a daily multivitamin were 2.4% more likely to die than the woman who weren’t taking a daily multivitamin. This doesn’t mean however, that taking the right individual supplements won’t improve your health. There have been many studies showing real measurable health benefits from taking the right amounts of specific individual supplements that are largely missing from our diets. These supplements include, Vitamin K2, Vitamin D (for people in far northern/southern latitudes), Magnesium, Anti-oxidants, Omega 3 Fish/Krill oils. In future posts I will discuss each of these supplements in much more detail and why we should be including them in our diets.