Mid-forties, varied diet, no diagnosed deficiencies, though I've also never actually had bloods done. I take a supermarket multivitamin most mornings out of pure habit and I cannot name a single thing it has done for me. Either it's cheap insurance or it's expensive urine, and every article I read on it was written by somebody selling one. What made you keep taking it, or stop?
Get bloods before you decide either way. I took a multi for six years and it turned out my ferritin had been on the floor the entire time, because the iron in a general multivitamin is a token amount. A test told me one specific thing to fix. The multi was quietly masking the question I should have been asking.
This is the answer. A multi is a shotgun aimed at a problem you'd much rather identify and target.
I keep taking one, deliberately unscientifically. There are fortnights where my diet collapses completely and a multi is the floor under those fortnights. That's not evidence, it's just my reasoning, and I'd rather state it as reasoning than dress it up.
Stopped taking one. What I replaced it with, after actually talking to my GP: vitamin D over winter, and nothing else. Cheaper, and I can tell you why I'm taking it, which I never could with the multi.
Look at whether the doses are absurd. Plenty of multis carry 1000%+ of some B vitamins purely as marketing and then a token scrape of magnesium. Big percentages on a label are a design choice, not a quality signal.
If you're on any regular medication, run it past a pharmacist. Some of the interactions are boring and real and nobody thinks to check.
@interval_ida · 4w ago · 3 replies
The most interesting recent evidence I know of is the COSMOS trial work on cognition in older adults — the multivitamin group scored better on cognitive testing over three years than placebo, with the authors framing the size as slowing cognitive ageing by a modest amount. Caveats matter: older adults, modest effect, cognition rather than how you feel on a Tuesday. It's genuinely the strongest multivitamin result in a while and it's still not a reason to expect to notice anything.
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@two_calendars · 3w ago
'Not something you'd notice' is a weirdly satisfying answer to have finally received.
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@interval_ida · 3w ago
Most genuine supplement effects are like that. The ones you notice within a week are caffeine and things that shouldn't be in the tub.
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