Why Multivitamins Don’t Work

Don’t get me wrong, I think taking a daily multivitamin is very important for certain people. Who are those people? They are in a generally good state of health and they want to stay that way. There are countless studies on how multivitamins help prevent cancer, diabetes and cardiovascular disease. The key word is prevent. In my almost 10 years of practice, I have never seen anyone with a current health problem who started taking a multivitamin and their health problem went away. That’s because disease conditions respond better to targeted nutrients. Throwing in 50 different vitamins and minerals when all you really need is 3, just means that the nutrients compete with each other for absorption and the body doesn’t get adequate quantities of what it really needs to fix a particular problem. This is where a good naturopath comes in handy, to be able to determine precisely which nutrients you need and how much of them to take in order to enable your body to reverse your health problem.

The other main problem with most of the highly advertised brands of multivitamins is that the quality is very poor:
1. The quantities of vitamins and minerals in them are very low,
2. The recommended frequency of taking them is too low at only once per day and
3. The forms of the various vitamins and minerals in them are usually the cheapest and most poorly utilized by the body. This maximizes the company’s profits and allows for them to produce expensive advertising campaigns.
Often the best quality supplements, including multivitamins, are by companies you have never heard of and are rarely found in a drugstore. This is because the really good quality vitamins are made by companies who invest very little in advertising, but instead divert their profits into research and quality control to produce exceptional quality products. Rather than expensive ad campaigns to lure the general public into buying their products, they educate discriminating health professionals like naturopaths who can then recommend them to their clients.