Dear Friends,
You may have seen news articles recently about a study on multivitamins that concluded they don’t help you live longer.
A few people have asked if I saw this (including a cousin who is very into supplements) – so I wanted to share my thoughts about it.
To start, in my view they’re asking and trying to answer the wrong question about multivitamins - and one that’s near impossible to prove one way or the other, especially based on how they did this study.
Why is this the wrong question?
Think about our bodies – we’re the most complex organisms and sophisticated machines the world has ever seen.
Picture all the different systems and organs at work inside your body right now, allowing you to function and live. It’s pretty overwhelming and amazing when you think about it.
Given all this complexity, does it make any sense that simply supplementing with a dozen or so vitamin compounds will extend the lifespan of our bodies?
Of course not – there are hundreds, if not thousands of nutritional compounds our bodies need to function so we can live and enjoy life.
And beyond nutrition, there’s a long list of things that will affect how long we live. Off the top of our heads, each of us can probably list 20 or more factors that affect the human lifespan.
That’s a big reason why I think the question that this study was set up to address was kind of misguided (not to mention how they went about it).
So Why Take a Multivitamin or Other Vitamin Supplement?
You take supplements with vitamins because we know these are important nutrients that our bodies need to function normally – and yet an estimated 90% of Americans fail to get the recommended amounts of these vitamins each day from diet alone.
And that’s true even if you have a good and relatively healthy diet. Try it yourself, keep a diary of your food intake for a week and use an app to estimate vitamin intake.
It’s not easy to hit the recommended daily amounts (RDAs) each day for each vitamin - and that’s why we take vitamin supplements, to help bridge nutritional gaps.
In case you don’t know, the RDAs are set by the Institute of Medicine, a non-government organization.
The purpose of the RDAs is to give you a guideline of the daily nutritional requirements for healthy individuals. The Institute of Medicine doesn’t say if you meet all the RDAs, you will live longer.
So why would we expect that taking a multivitamin alone would result in us living longer?
Again the premise of this study made no sense – and the resulting headlines make people think vitamin supplements aren’t helpful – which we know isn’t the case.
Research Shows Value of Vitamin Supplements
As you may know, there’s plenty of research indicating multivitamin and vitamin supplements provide value and help support different functions in the body.
In fact, recently a study found taking a multivitamin can support cognitive function, as prior studies have also indicated.
Other studies indicate a multivitamin may support certain aspects of heart and cardiovascular health. Vitamins can also help support immune system function too.
You take a multivitamin to live better, not just live longer.
Quality of life is important - we want all of our years to be good years and want to make our last years be time where we can still enjoy life and not just stick around.
And that’s part of the case for taking a multivitamin – it helps us satisfy some basic nutritional needs.
Problems With How This Study Was Conducted
Now, turning it to the “longevity” study itself, there’s a few things you should know about this study and how it was done.
First, it was an observational study – it looked back at data collected and tracked for other purposes. It wasn’t a blinded randomized placebo-controlled study, which is considered the gold standard.
Instead, they used data from surveys mailed out by the National Institute of Health and some others starting back in the 1990s. Each year, the NIH mails out its survey asking a bunch of diet and health questions and recipients would mail them back.
So there’s no examinations, bloodwork or even interviews done, just the survey responses. The researchers in the multivitamin study used responses from about 390,000 of these folks who mailed in their surveys over 20 years.
As you can see, this is very different from the controlled study environment you see in randomized placebo-controlled studies. And that makes it hard to draw any conclusions, especially on something like death and mortality rates.
As mentioned, there are so many factors that determine lifespan – diet and lifestyle factors, family history, economic status, where you live, environmental factors, and things like your access to good health care.
It’s hard to isolate lifespan to one factor like in this case, multivitamin use.
Don’t Let This Study Deter You From Taking Vitamins
Think of the other challenges of collecting data from 390,000 folks via 20 years of surveys.
For example, what products were they using? We know there are quality differences among different vitamin brands, as well as the form and source of vitamins used, and dosage amounts.
Were they all really taking the same products daily for 20 years? Probably not. How is that reflected?
And, more generally, think of how your own personal behavior has changed over 20 years. How can the researchers account for behavior changes among 390,000 participants for this long period of time? It’s not really feasible, which makes it hard to draw any reliable conclusions from the data.
One question I would have for these researchers is - what do you suggest we do?
We know about 90% of the population struggles to meet vitamin RDAs (even the good eaters), do we just ignore this fact and not try to bridge the gap?
I would not let this study discourage you from taking vitamin supplements – and always look for quality brands.
We recommend choosing a multivitamin made from organic food sources, which is how we formulated TrueMulti.
Yours for Good Health,
Carl Pradelli
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