Daily health insurance with a multivitamin

Posted on Sun, 25 Apr 10

A multivitamin formula can help ensure that your daily requirement of over 40 essential vitamins and minerals is met. Emerging evidence suggests that maintaining optimal daily micronutrient intake may help prevent chronic diseases such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, dementia, macular degeneration and osteoporosis (1).

“We don’t need multivitamins because we can get everything we need from food.”

This statement would be true if every day we ate a wide variety of local, seasonal, organic fruits and vegetables grown in nutrient rich soils and virgin water that hadn’t been picked green, gas ripened, irradiated, shipped, placed in cold storage, left to sit on the supermarket shelf and then cooked within an inch of their life. Add to these increased nutritional needs due to factors such as pollution, alcohol, stress and chronic disease and it becomes quickly apparent that everyone needs a daily multivitamin.

In a review of vitamins for disease prevention published in the Journal of the American Medical Association it was concluded that; “Most people do not consume an optimal amount of all vitamins by diet alone. Pending strong evidence of effectiveness from randomized trials, it appears prudent for all adults to take vitamin supplements (2).”

What do the experts say?

Multivitamin supplements are not intended to replace healthy eating recommendations; rather leading experts recommend they are used as part of a healthy diet and lifestyle (3).

Walter Willet M.D. and Meir Stampfer M.D from Harvard Medical School wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine that “Substantial data suggest that higher intakes of folic acid, vitamin B6, vitamin B12, and vitamin D will benefit many people, and a multivitamin will ensure an adequate intake of other vitamins for which the evidence of benefit is indirect (4).”

Dr Bruce Ames, Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, University of California, Berkeley also says that “micronutrient inadequacies are widespread in the population, and a multivitamin and mineral supplement is inexpensive. A solution is to encourage multivitamin and mineral supplementation, particularly in those groups with widespread deficiencies such as the poor, teenagers, the obese, and the elderly, in addition to urging people to eat a more balanced diet (5).”

A daily multivitamin makes good sense

Multivitamin and mineral supplements are a relatively inexpensive way to ensure optimal daily nutrition.  There is a strong theoretical underpinning for the use of multivitamins as a safe and effective means of ensuring daily nutritional adequacy, preventing disease and promoting optimal health.

References

1. Ames BN. Increasing longevity by tuning up metabolism: To maximize human health and lifespan, scientists must abandon outdated models of micronutrients. EMBO reports VOL 6 | SPECIAL ISSUE | 2005.

2. Fletcher RH, Fairfield KM. Vitamins for chronic disease prevention in adults:  clinical applications. JAMA. 2002 Jun 19;287(23):3127-9.

3. Willett WC (2001) Eat, Drink and be Healthy. New York, NY, USA: Simon & Schuster.

4. Willet W, Stampfer M. What vitamins should I be taking doctor? N Engl J Med, Vol. 345, No. 25· December 20, 2001

5. Ames B. Low micronutrient intake may accelerate the degenerative diseases of aging through allocation of scarce micronutrients by triage. PNAS. November 21, 2006.  vol. 103;  no. 47: 17589–17594.