More proof that multi-vitamins accomplish little to nothing

I have previously written about many things in the supplement industry that are bogus and unnecessary products that make the producers billions of dollars every year. There is one that is the grand-daddy of them all though and that is your good ol' stock standard multi-vitamins.

I've been taking them most of my life and when I was a kid each of us would get this chewable vitamin that tasted like candy called *Flintstones" vitamins.

src

These things were delicious and even though my family was not wealthy, they were something that we always had. My mom would keep them on the high shelf but every now and then we would sneak up there and get a super vitamin overload. It contained the usual vitamins like C, D, and A as well as some minerals and calcium. We took them for my entire childhood and probably at great expense.

At other points in my life I took a multivitamin just because they were for sale and I figured "it can't hurt!" and I presumed I would just be filling in the gaps that I was missing with my usual diet.

I have long suspected that there might not be any real benefit to this and my feeling was based on nothing other than just a general distrust of the supplement industry. Well now I have scientific proof that my suspicions have been correct.

src

The massive multivitamin manufacturing companies have likely been aware of this for a very long time, but they were not going to tell anyone. Also, when I think about it, the companies NEVER actually said that these things were there to benefit you, they just said what they contained and created various brands for men, women, seniors, and kids. They never made grandiose claims they would prevent or cure any disease. In fact, it says exactly that on the packaging.

This new (ish) study that started in 2014 involves 84 different double-blind studies and it involved more than 700,000 people in the study. The full, science-language-filled abstract can be read here but it basically comes to the conclusion that there was no difference between the health of the participants that took the multivitamins and the participants that took a placebo.

This was ONLY for people who didn't have vitamin deficiencies though, so if you have a diagnosed lack of ability to produce a certain vitamin, you should probably get your hands on that via a doctor. I'm not going to go down the road of how that is accomplished but this study was measuring already reasonably healthy people with no pre-existing conditions, which is likely most people especially those that exercise and monitor their diets to a certain degree. People like me.

So in the end this massive study has said that there is no noticeable benefit to taking a daily multivitamin, but there is no harm either. The "no harm" thing is nice and all but I wonder how many millions upon millions of people have been taking these things for their entire lives thinking that it was helping them in some way. If I were to try to put a silver lining on this cloud I would say that the mind is a very powerful thing and perhaps the people who believed there was some benefit started to feel said benefits because they believed in the product. So I suppose that was a good thing.

The study went on to point out that the processed vitamins and minerals are definitely not a substitute for eating foods rich in these same vitamins and that science doesn't fully understand why this is. I guess it isn't important enough to study.

In the meantime, if you are taking multi-vitamins in the belief that is helping to keep you healthier, I got some bad news for you: They almost certainly are not.

_{I haven't always been health-conscious, in my 30's I was the opposite of this. But I've learned a lot since then and made a ton of mistakes so that you don't have to. If I can turn my life around the way that I did I believe that almost anyone else can as well}