DO YOU NEED A DAILY MULTIVITAMIN?
After hearing from my doctor that I didn’t really need it, I stopped taking a daily multivitamin a couple of years ago. And now I’m seeing articles from reliable sources saying the same thing: Healthy adults over age 50 simply don’t need a multivitamin. I searched for a source to pass on some of the details behind this advice to give you. Here are excerpts from the recent Johns Hopkins Medicine online newsletter Is There Really Any Benefit to Multivitamins?
Half of all American adults—including 70 percent of those age 65 and older—take a multivitamin or another vitamin or mineral supplement regularly. The total price tag exceeds $12 billion per year—money that Johns Hopkins nutrition experts say might be better spent on nutrient-packed foods like fruit, vegetables, whole grains and low-fat dairy products.
In an editorial in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine titled “Enough Is Enough: Stop Wasting Money on Vitamin and Mineral Supplements,” Johns Hopkins researchers reviewed evidence about supplements, including three very recent studies:
- An analysis of research involving 450,000 people, which found that multivitamins did not reduce risk for heart disease or cancer.
- A study that tracked the mental functioning and multivitamin use of 5,947 men for 12 years found that multivitamins did not reduce risk for mental declines such as memory loss or slowed-down thinking.
- A study of 1,708 heart attack survivors who took a high-dose multivitamin or placebo for up to 55 months. Rates of later heart attacks, heart surgeries and deaths were similar in the two groups.
The Vitamin Verdict
The researchers concluded that multivitamins don’t reduce the risk for heart disease, cancer, cognitive decline (such as memory loss and slowed-down thinking) or an early death. They also noted that in prior studies, vitamin E and beta-carotene supplements appear to be harmful, especially at high doses.
“Pills are not a shortcut to better health and the prevention of chronic diseases,” says Larry Appel, M.D., director of the Johns Hopkins Welch Center for Prevention, Epidemiology and Clinical Research. “Other nutrition recommendations have much stronger evidence of benefits—eating a healthy diet, maintaining a healthy weight, and reducing the amount of saturated fat, trans fat, sodium and sugar you eat.”
“I don’t recommend other supplements,” Appel says. “If you follow a healthy diet, you can get all of the vitamins and minerals you need from food.”
“I try to eat three healthy meals a day to get the vitamins, minerals and other nutrients I need.” How he does it:
- Plenty of produce. “I aim for two or more servings of fruits or vegetables at every meal,” he says. “I enjoy salads and have one for lunch or dinner several times a week.”
- Low-fat dairy and whole grains. “Low-fat or fat-free milk and yogurt provide calcium, magnesium, potassium and other nutrients,” he says. “I have cereal with milk for breakfast a few times a week. And I have yogurt sometimes too.”
- “At home we usually have fish or chicken for dinner. I am not a vegetarian; rather, I eat minimal meat,” Appel says. Some fish, such as salmon, are a good source of healthful omega-3 fatty acids.
—————————————————————————————————————–
I try to follow the 3-healthy-meals-a-day advice from Dr. Appel. But I also still take a couple of vitamins which I believe I don’t get the recommended daily amount of in my diet: Vitamin B12 and Vitamin D. But you can decide for yourself whether you get all the vitamins you need from food or might need an extra dose of this or that.