Should you be taking a daily multivitamin

— August 7, 2015

With winter coming, you might feel that your body’s defences are down and a multivitamin could be a good insurance policy for your well-being. So you find yourself in front of an overwhelming array of multivitamins at the store. Aside from the obvious categories (kids, adults, seniors, men, women, pregnant women, post-menopausal women), which ones should you choose? Are all brands created equal? Or should you be taking them at all?

As with anything regarding your health, get medical advice. Even seemingly innocuous multivitamins could interfere with other medication you’re taking. Visit your doctor for a blood test to determine what vitamins or minerals you’re lacking. He or she may recommend targeting certain ones to get them up to normal levels before taking a multivitamin—or may suggest taking only those supplements your body needs, instead of a multivitamin that could include unnecessary ones.

You can research specific brands of multivitamins, and it might be worth the price of a subscription to ConsumerReports.org or ConsumerLab.com for this. However, as you’re doing your price comparisons, remember that both these organizations found that in general, house brand vitamins were as good as the brand name products, while costing less. Whatever you buy should have a stamp of approval from a group such as USP (United States Pharmacopoeia), NSF (NSF International), CL (ConsumerLab.com) or some other indication of quality control.

When purchasing multivitamins, you want to be sure that:

they contain the amounts of vitamins and minerals claimed on the label;
they dissolve quickly enough so they don’t leave your digestive system before your body can absorb what it needs;
they have been made following GMP (good manufacturing process) guidelines, so there are no contaminants in them.

What do you think about the efficacy of multivitamins?

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/druginfo/meds/a682882.html

http://www.consumerreports.org/health/natural-health/multivitamins/overview/index.htm

https://www.consumerlab.com/reviews/review_multivitamin_compare/multivitamins/