What do you take? Why? I've been on mega men energy for a couple of years, and they work well, but my stock is out and I'd like to look around. I've also taken Animal Pak before and liked it.
I just take a Centrum Peformance every morning. I'm in good health, but then again, I was probably in good health before I started taking vitamins as well. I think a well-rounded diet is probably much more important than a multi-vitamin, but I'm sure the vitamin helps fill in the gaps in your nourishment. Also, the fact that vitamins are water-soluble also means that you don't get nearly as much of the assorted values as it claims on the bottle (at least that's my understanding of it).
There's been study after study suggesting these are absolutely worthless..that they do nothing to promote health.
I take ON Opti-Men. I eat healthy but it's still hard to get a fully balanced diet. http://www.optimumnutrition.com/products/optimen-mens-multiple-p-180.html I also take EFA lean gold stuff works great and provides EFA's that are hard to get otherwise.
The problem with most of them are that they aren't even fully digested by the stomach. Essentially, you just have really expensive urine. A lot of the more expensive packs have other supplements that you would be better taking during a more appropriate time of the day. With that being said, some people have huge nutritional holes in their every day diet. A multivitamin does more good than harm. I would recommend a simple vitamin like Centrum. Personally, I can't stand taking 8+ pills at once.
true. i usually just take a half a multivitamin and/or i just take them overyother day. If you eat relatively well you get most of what you need and you don't need 1000% of each item vitamin/mineral. I don't think there is anything wrong with taking vitamins, but i don't think you have to worry as much about doing full dosages daily.
And there has been more scientific study that vitamins do have beneficial effects. Of course, it's not going to cure you. By the time you have a disease, vitamins are supplementary as opposed to a cure. Long term vitamin use will have benefits. That's why there's a huge consumer market and research money poured into vitamins and other antioxidants.
This is the only supplement I take: gets you all the nutrients the modern diet lacks. try it a week and I promise you'll actually notice a difference in how you feel.
is that right? i'm certainly not a doctor, but it seems like everytime a study comes out that says they make a difference for the average person, it can't be replicated when it's done again. seems like every time a read about multivitamins on the market, i'm reading that they can't find any links to that and good health. Here's a NY Times article from 2009 that talks about the subject, generally: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/17/health/17well.html Vitamin Pills: A False Hope? Published: February 16, 2009 Ever since the Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Linus Pauling first promoted “megadoses” of essential nutrients 40 years ago, Americans have been devoted to their vitamins. Today about half of all adults use some form of dietary supplement, at a cost of $23 billion a year. But are vitamins worth it? In the past few years, several high-quality studies have failed to show that extra vitamins, at least in pill form, help prevent chronic disease or prolong life. The latest news came last week after researchers in the Women’s Health Initiative study tracked eight years of multivitamin use among more than 161,000 older women. Despite earlier findings suggesting that multivitamins might lower the risk for heart disease and certain cancers, the study, published in The Archives of Internal Medicine, found no such benefit. Last year, a study that tracked almost 15,000 male physicians for a decade reported no differences in cancer or heart disease rates among those using vitamins E and C compared with those taking a placebo. And in October, a study of 35,000 men dashed hopes that high doses of vitamin E and selenium could lower the risk of prostate cancer. Of course, consumers are regularly subjected to conflicting reports and claims about the benefits of vitamins, and they seem undeterred by the news — to the dismay of some experts. “I’m puzzled why the public in general ignores the results of well-done trials,” said Dr. Eric Klein, national study coordinator for the prostate cancer trial and chairman of the Cleveland Clinic’s Glickman Urological and Kidney Institute. “The public’s belief in the benefits of vitamins and nutrients is not supported by the available scientific data.” Everyone needs vitamins, which are essential nutrients that the body can’t produce on its own. Inadequate vitamin C leads to scurvy, for instance, and a lack of vitamin D can cause rickets. But a balanced diet typically provides an adequate level of these nutrients, and today many popular foods are fortified with extra vitamins and minerals. As a result, diseases caused by nutrient deficiency are rare in the United States. In any event, most major vitamin studies in recent years have focused not on deficiencies but on whether high doses of vitamins can prevent or treat a host of chronic illnesses. While people who eat lots of nutrient-rich fruits and vegetables have long been known to have lower rates of heart disease and cancer, it hasn’t been clear whether ingesting high doses of those same nutrients in pill form results in a similar benefit. In January, an editorial in The Journal of the National Cancer Institute noted that most trials had shown no cancer benefits from vitamins — with a few exceptions, like a finding that calcium appeared to lower the recurrence of precancerous colon polyps by 15 percent. But some vitamin studies have also shown unexpected harm, like higher lung cancer rates in two studies of beta carotene use. Another study suggested a higher risk of precancerous polyps among users of folic acid compared with those in a placebo group. In 2007, The Journal of the American Medical Association reviewed mortality rates in randomized trials of antioxidant supplements. In 47 trials of 181,000 participants, the rate was 5 percent higher among the antioxidant users. The main culprits were vitamin A, beta carotene and vitamin E; vitamin C and selenium seemed to have no meaningful effect. “We call them essential nutrients because they are,” said Marian L. Neuhouser, an associate member in cancer prevention at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. “But there has been a leap into thinking that vitamins and minerals can prevent anything from fatigue to cancer to Alzheimer’s. That’s where the science didn’t pan out.” Everyone is struggling to make sense of the conflicting data, said Andrew Shao, vice president for scientific and regulatory affairs at the Council for Responsible Nutrition, a vitamin industry trade group. Consumers and researchers need to “redefine our expectations for these nutrients,” he said. “They aren’t magic bullets.” Part of the problem, he said, may stem from an inherent flaw in the way vitamins are studied. With drugs, the gold standard for research is a randomized clinical trial in which some patients take a drug and others a placebo. But vitamins are essential nutrients that people ingest in their daily diets; there is no way to withhold them altogether from research subjects. Vitamins given in high doses may also have effects that science is only beginning to understand. In a test tube, cancer cells gobble up vitamin C, and studies have shown far higher levels of vitamin C in tumor cells than are found in normal tissue. The selling point of antioxidant vitamins is that they mop up free radicals, the damaging molecular fragments linked to aging and disease. But some free radicals are essential to proper immune function, and wiping them out may inadvertently cause harm. In a study at the University of North Carolina, mice with brain cancer were given both normal and vitamin-depleted diets. The ones who were deprived of antioxidants had smaller tumors, and 20 percent of the tumor cells were undergoing a type of cell death called apoptosis, which is fueled by free radicals. In the fully nourished mice, only 3 percent of tumor cells were dying. “Most antioxidants are also pro-oxidants,” said Dr. Peter H. Gann, professor and director of research in the department of pathology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “In the right context and the right dose, they may be able to cause problems rather than prevent them.” Scientists suspect that the benefits of a healthful diet come from eating the whole fruit or vegetable, not just the individual vitamins found in it. “There may not be a single component of broccoli or green leafy vegetables that is responsible for the health benefits,” Dr. Gann said. “Why are we taking a reductionist approach and plucking out one or two chemicals given in isolation?” Even so, some individual vitamin research is continuing. Scientists are beginning to study whether high doses of whole-food extracts can replicate the benefits of a vegetable-rich diet. And Harvard researchers are planning to study whether higher doses of vitamin D in 20,000 men and women can lower risk for cancer and other chronic diseases. “Vitamin D looks really promising,” said Dr. JoAnn E. Manson, the chief of preventive medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and an investigator on several Harvard vitamin studies. “But we need to learn the lessons from the past. We should wait for large-scale clinical trials before jumping on the vitamin bandwagon and taking high doses.”
As far as I know most studies were conducted on healthy people, so its only natural multivitamins show little effect on people who already get their vitamins from a balanced diet. I take fish oil pills and vitamin D, don't get enough sunlight, even though I live in San Diego. The most recent shows a strong correlation between strong vitamin D levels and a decrease in plethora of illnesses. Though, nothing has been really proven since there's no money in proving sunlight is essential to good health.
I'm guessing every time you say a study comes out, you get it from your local news channel. I read actual scientific journals and being in the healthcare field, any contemporary healthcare professional will advocate vitamin use.
Is the US National Institutes of Health an organization comprised of "contemporary healthcare professionals?" http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/24/us-vitamins-stop-cancer-idUSTRE72N6K720110324 (Reuters Health) - Will taking multivitamins protect you from dying of cancer or heart disease? The answer is no, according to new research. In a study of more than 180,000 people, scientists saw the same number of deaths from cancer and heart disease among multivitamin-takers and those who did not take the supplements. "People need to understand that just taking these multivitamins is not sufficient to prevent disease," said Jennifer Hsiang-Ling Lin, assistant professor of medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, who did not work on the study. Multiple past studies have shown no link between multivitamins and reduced risk of cancer or heart disease. Other recent research couldn't prove that multivitamins protect against diabetes, either. Some small studies in the past have shown that specific vitamins, not multivitamins, may be protective against heart disease or cancer later in life. However these studies looked at undernourished people, not generally healthy adults like the U.S. population, said co-author Song-Yi Park, assistant professor of epidemiology at University of Hawaii Cancer Center in Honolulu. On its web site, the U.S. National Institutes of Health advise that doctors should prescribe multivitamins only "for patients who need extra vitamins, who cannot eat enough food to obtain the required vitamins, or who cannot receive the full benefit of the vitamins contained in the food they eat." But more than half of U.S. adults choose to take multivitamins, according to Lin. Many do because they think it will prevent chronic disease, said Ross Prentice, director of the Public Health Sciences Division at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, who also did not work on the new study. Altogether, Park's team looked at the vitamin-popping habits of more than 82,000 men and nearly 100,000 women, who were an average of 60 years old. Then they tracked how many died, and the causes, over the next 11 years. Overall, about six in 100 multivitamin users and non-users died from heart disease. Cancer claimed about five in 100 from both groups, and four in 100 died from other causes. In total, almost 29,000 people died in the 11 years of follow-up. The multivitamins didn't seem to protect users from cancer in general, or from cancers of the lung, colon, rectum, prostate, or breast. Each year in the U.S. about 616,000 people die from heart disease and about 560,000 die from cancer, according to the American Cancer Society. The researchers did not find that taking multivitamins hurts anyone, Lin noted. However, they can be expensive. According to Consumer Reports, Americans spent almost $4.7 billion on multivitamins in 2008. Depending on the type, supplements range from $3 to $16 a month. This study could not prove that multivitamins do or don't affect people's risks for heart disease and cancer. A large clinical trial -- one that can show cause and effect, if it exists -- is underway but the results aren't available yet. Past studies have mostly involved Caucasians, Lin said. The current one, published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, included large numbers of Latino and Japanese-American people. This shows that the lack of association held up for different racial groups as well, she said. The best way to reduce the risk of cancer and heart disease, according to Lin? Exercise and eat a healthy diet.
