Do Multivitamins Prevent Disease?

. . . which multivitamins are you talking about? Last December, Big Pharma, through the Annals of Internal Medicine, launched a major attack on multivitamins, essentially declaring them useless for preventing disease. But the truth is vitamins, minerals and other nutrients have been shown a thousand times over to prevent and reverse disease, whereas drugs primarily suppress symptoms, make overall health worse, and regularly kill thousands of people annually, even when properly prescribed and administered. In his recent article “Vitamins are a Waste of Money?” Raymond Francis exposed the fallacy in most of the huge studies that have purported to show multivitamins are useless: they use low-dose, low-quality multis like Centrum. Thus, these costly studies are designed to fail.  In fact, if you read Raymond’s analysis of the ingredients in Centrum Silver Adults 50+, you’ll wonder why more of the studies don’t show multivitamins cause disease! However, even Centrum, taken over 11 years, reduced total cancer risk by 8% in a study involving almost 15,000 men. And another large recent study using data from close to 8,000 postmenopausal women with invasive breast cancer found that those who were taking a multivitamin with minerals reduced their risk of mortality by 30% over 7 years. The women in this study were not assigned to take a specific multi; researchers merely noted those who took a multi of their own choice. Although unfortunately most people still choose multis on the basis of price, at least some of these women were probably taking higher quality multivitamins, which could account for the robust results. Contrary to the recent hullabaloo, one of the best ways to prevent disease is taking a high-quality multi, like the Beyond Health’s Multi-Vitamin. In fact, at Beyond Health we believe it’s necessary for maintaining optimal health, and that the current irresponsible campaign to discredit vitamins is a great disservice to the public, likely to result in increased healthcare costs to our nation.  

Gaziano JM. Multivitamins in the prevention of cancer in men: The Physicians’ Health Study II Randomized Controlled Trial. Journal of the American Medical Association. November 2012;308(18):1871-1880.

Wassertheil-Smoller S. Multivitamin and mineral use and breast cancer mortality in older women with invasive breast cancer in the women’s health initiative. Breast Cancer Research and Treatment, October 14, 2013;141(3):495-505.