For decades, the advice was simple: “Eat a balanced diet and you’ll get everything you need.” While that’s true in theory, in practice the modern food supply and lifestyle make it harder to rely on food alone for optimal nutrition. A high-quality multivitamin can serve as an important safety net—even for healthy people.
Declining Nutrient Density in Food
Historical comparisons of food composition data show a clear trend: fruits and vegetables today contain significantly fewer vitamins and minerals than they did 50–100 years ago. For example, you’d need over two bananas now to equal the iron content of one banana from decades ago and 2–3 peaches to equal the Vitamin A content that one used to provide. This decline is largely due to modern agricultural practices: high-yield crops are bred for size, sweetness, and shelf life—not mineral density. Over time, our food has become less nutrient-dense, even if it looks the same on the outside.
Conditions Multivitamins May Help Improve or Prevent
Clinical studies suggest that regular use of multivitamins can help fill nutrient gaps and even reduce risk of certain conditions. While multivitamins aren’t a replacement for eating well, they do offer measurable benefits:
- Cognitive health: Large trials show that daily multivitamin use in older adults can help slow age-related cognitive decline.
- Eye health: Formulas containing antioxidants and zinc reduce progression risk in age-related macular degeneration.
- Immune function: Adequate intake of vitamin D, vitamin C, and zinc supports better immune resilience and lowering susceptibility to infections.
- Birth defects: Multivitamins with folate significantly reduce neural tube defects when taken before and during early pregnancy.
- General prevention: Some evidence suggests daily multivitamin use lowers cancer risk.
Even in healthy adults, consistent supplementation helps ensure small deficiencies don’t compound into long-term health issues.
Quality Matters
Not all multivitamins are created equal, which may be the reason that some studies show no overall benefit with their use. In fact, the differences between high-quality, third-party tested supplements and generic store-bought options are significant:
- Purity and Testing: Higher quality options undergo third-party testing to confirm label accuracy, purity, and absence of contaminants.
- Formulation: Higher quality optionsuse active forms of vitamins (e.g., methylfolate instead of folic acid, methylcobalamin instead of cyanocobalamin) for better bioavailability while store-bought often use cheaper, synthetic forms that some people cannot metabolize effectively.
- Dosing: The amount of nutrients can vary dramatically with some products containing therapeutic levels and others containing low doses to cut costs, or over-loaded with nutrients in non-useful forms.
Where to Shop
Be careful! If you’re looking for a great multivitamin, you can always rely on Fullscript.com for high quality options, with free shipping on orders over $50. Local compounding pharmacies also carry reputable brands and can often order options they don’t carry in store for you. Read more about navigating the supplement industry in another of my articles: https://boisenaturalhealth.com/navigating-the-supplement-industry/