Multivitamins are Anything But Useless

Why Multivitamins are Necessary for Optimal Health

Sigh. Two studies in the Journal Annals of Internal Medicine in December 2013 were trotted out to prove that multivitamins do not work. The studies in question showed that multivitamins do not prevent a second heart attack nor Alzheimer’s Disease. On the one hand we are told that antioxidants in our diet reduce mortality and on the other that they are not beneficial.

It is true that synthetic multivitamins are not as good as real food. It is also true that most multivitamins have too little of too many micronutrients. It is doubtful that those studies considered these points. More doubtful still that they took into account our gut flora’s health as a key factor in not only absorption of micronutrients, but as important players at the cellular level.

“Postbiotics” is the new name for any substance, chemical or food, modified and processed by our gut flora. In other words, if a study subject had a poor diet and consequently a poor microbiome, anything he/she ingested was not properly absorbed nor processed in the gut, including a poorly absorbed multivitamin.

Another problem with those two studies is that they involved very ill patients whose advance diseases of the heart and brain often do not respond to any treatment modalities. Do you seriously expect a multivitamin, as flawed as they are, to prevent a second heart attack, and Alzheimer’s, the latter even untreatable by the most modern of drugs?

Multivitamins play a very important role in supplementing the diets of people who do not get all the nutrients they need from their diet, and that’s most of us.