Are Vitamins Good for Your Health?

If you follow the news about health reports, you're probably a little bit confused about whether you should be taking a multivitamin. And I certainly wouldn't blame you. I was confused, myself, so I looked into further to draw a conclusion of my own. I'll get to that, but before I do, I just wanted to mention that it's always best to do the work yourself and draw your own conclusions. But I know many of us are too busy, so I thought it would be helpful if I summed things up for you. From here, you can do your own research or not – it's up to you.
Research Against Vitamins

Recent research has shown that men who supplement with vitamin E and selenium are at a greater risk of developing prostate cancer. This study actually began to prove whether vitamin E supplementation could reduce the risk of prostate cancer in men. It was stopped when researchers found no conclusive benefit, but in a later follow up, they found that those on the vitamin E and selenium had a 17 percent greater chance of getting prostate cancer.

Another study of women in Iowa showed that women who took multivitamins and other supplements consistently for a 19-year period had an increased rate of mortality.

Examining the Research

Whenever you hear or read the results of any study, it's important that you get all the facts. I've provided links to more info each study, so you can learn more, if you'd like. It would be too long for me to summarize all of the details here, so I'm just going to point out what I think is important.

In the study of men taking vitamin E and selenium, the men were given a very high dose of each. The RDA of vitamin E is about 22.4 IU and the participants were given 400 IU. To be fair, may vitamin E supplements do contain as much as 200 IU, but that's still half the amount of what they used in the study. I don't know that 200 IU would increase the risk of prostate cancer and neither do they. More research needs to be done.

To conclude that multivitamins and other supplements increase mortality in women, researchers looked at the data from over three thousand women with an average age of 61.6. The increased rate of mortality for those taking multivitamins was 2.4 percent. The risk increased for those taking other vitamins including B6, folic acid and magnesium.

My Opinion on Vitamin Supplementation

From this research, and other research I've read, I wouldn't conclude that taking a multivitamin is risky. An increased mortality rate of 2.4 percent really isn't that high, and we don't know what the actual cases of death were. I would; however, conclude that taking high doses of any vitamin supplement is risky. I also believe that it's more of a risk to take individual vitamin supplements (including vitamin B6, E and selenium) than it is to take a multivitamin. This is probably because the vitamins are in higher dose when they aren't combined with other vitamins. We also don't know enough about the relationship between vitamins to take them independently. For all we know, giving the body calcium without vitamin D could be just as effective as giving a tattoo artist a needle without ink.