Do multivitamins actually work?

Question

I’ve been told that you just pass them through your digestive system like a seed by some and then that they are critical to your health by others.

In: 147

Answer 1

Having a vitamin deficiency can be a serious issue – like between seriously hurting your quality of life to making you irritable and depressed to putting you on death’s doorstep.

Most people get all the vitamins they need from their diet and don’t need vitamin supplements at all. Some people don’t get what they need because of their diet, or need a larger amount due to medical conditions.

For example – I mean this isn’t a vitamin but I had an ex that ate mostly vegetarian and had heavy periods so she was perpetually boarderline iron deficient. That’s where the supplement comes in.

The other most common situation is kids during a growth spurt where the body just used all the resources up.

As people get older especially they start to have health issues, plus, for many people, their food intake starts to narrow in variety. This leads to increased chances they aren’t getting enough of something.

So I think the logic behind multi-vitamins is “better take enough of everything so anything you weren’t already getting is covered”. While the large-dose single vitamin supplements are more for people that are deficient in one particular vitamin which is something you probably needed a doctor to diagnose.

But, to your point, the vitamin industry doesn’t just serve these two groups of people: those that are old and at risk of deficiency and those that have a specific deficiency.

They want to sell as many as possible so they try to convince people it will make you healthier or it will prevent disease (like vitamin c). That’s pretty much bunk – your kidneys do filter out any extra and you end up pissing it out.

If you want to take a multivitamin just to be safe that you aren’t missing anything then go for it. But if you are looking at them as some kind of medicine to make you live longer where more is always better you are probably out of luck unless you actually have a deficiency.