Multi-Vitamins
A controversial topic among health professionals is multivitamin / mineral use. The purists (mostly tree-huggers) say that we can get all of the nutrition we need from food. This is obviously true if we eat a healthy, well-planned, varied diet that is very high in fruits and vegetables. Unfortunately, this kind of diet is about as common as sightings of dodo birds and unicorns – let’s face it, most people just don’t know enough or care enough to adopt this type of diet! For these people, it makes perfect sense to take a “multi” to avoid deficiencies of any of the essential nutrients. However, be aware that taking a multi definitely cannot provide the health benefits available from the hundreds of other healthy components of good foods.
The arguments for taking a multi are many. Even people who have a reasonably good diet could possibly benefit from a multi – just as a nutritional insurance policy. Remember, many countries like the USA and Canada add vitamin D, iron, folate, iodine and other nutrients to various foods and this has been proven to effectively minimize birth defects and other diseases that could result from deficiencies. A Harvard Medical School survey showed that health professionals, especially those who know the most about supplements, are big users. In fact, 81 percent of them had used a vitamin, mineral or fish oil supplement in the previous week.
Now for the recent research – beyond just using a multi for nutritional “insurance”, research suggests that they may decrease appetite and are associated with lower body weight, body fat and higher energy expenditure. It turns out that obese subjects who took supplements experienced all of these advantages and when obese subjects who didn’t take supplements were given them, they had lower appetite scores than the group who receive the inactive placebo pill.
So the take-home message here is that unless your diet is very good and includes a large variety of foods, you could likely benefit from a multi but the best advice is to try to optimize your diet, as this will have the most beneficial effects up your health. Additionally, taking a multi may decrease appetite and decrease fat mass and body weight. You will find pretty every brand will do a multi, here are a few suggestions as to some that I find to be very good. PHD – Catalyst, Reflex – Nexgen, Animal – Animal Pak, MuscleTech – Vitakic
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