from Chris Masterjohn, "Will Multivitamins Help You Live Longer?" August 12, 2024.
He opens with a new observational study on how multivitamins might actually slightly decrease your lifespan.
I like the opening,
THE SHORT ANSWER
The best way to get all your micronutrients in is to have an average daily intake of one or two ounces of liver, one or two oysters, a tablespoon or two of unfortified nutritional yeast, several servings of something rich in vitamin C such as bell peppers or strawberries, and a large volume of potassium-rich foods, such as the lean portions of meat, eggs, and milk; legumes, such as lentils, peas, and beans; tubers such as potatoes; and fruits and vegetables. If you don’t follow these rules of thumb, track your diet in Cronometer (see How to Track Your Diet in Cronometer) to make sure you are hitting all the micronutrient targets. If you cannot meet your micronutrient targets with foods, use a high-quality multivitamin such as Adapt Naturals and Seeking Health Optimal Multivitamin Chewable. If you really want to optimize, run the Comprehensive Nutritional Screening and use the screening and Cronometer to keep tweaking till everything is fully on target.
If you have a loved one who is not motivated to do any of this, have them take a run-of-the-mill drugstore multivitamin. The data support that it has almost no effect on lifespan but is good for the health span.
MULTIVITAMINS ARE FAR FROM USELESS
The Benefits of a Multivitamin:
They reduce high blood pressure [1] and they provide a number of brain-boosting benefits, ranging from improvements in short-term memory [2] to reductions in stress, anxiety, fatigue, and confusion.[3] Older adults who take multivitamins spend 2.5 fewer weeks a year being sick than those who don’t,[4] and there’s some evidence that multivitamins can even reduce the risk of cataracts,[5] a common cause of cloudy vision.
Multivitamins are especially important in pregnancy when women are medically advised to take a special formulation known as a prenatal vitamin. Use of multivitamins during pregnancy reduces the risk of miscarriage[6] and birth defects,[7] and it may even reduce the risk of childhood cancers.[8] Multivitamins also seem to prevent preeclampsia,[9] a condition that causes nausea, vomiting, high blood pressure, and headache, and when left untreated can lead to seizures and even the death of the mother.
At this point, the benefits of multivitamins come to a screeching halt.
Multis do nothing to reduce the risk of heart disease or cancer,[10] the leading causes of death,[11] and as a result, they don’t make us live any longer.[12] Although most studies show that multivitamins are safe,[13] they appear to worsen the risk of age-related macular degeneration,[14] the leading cause of blindness in older adults.
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