My stance on this topic has actually been gradually shifting in recent times.
Since the modern diet tends to lack a lot of the important vitamins/minerals that our bodies need, I used to think that a multivitamin could act as a nice "insurance policy" to fill in the gaps. The processing that much of our food goes through today tends to destroy its nutritional value. Because of this, many of our foods - such as bread, cereal, pasta, etc - have to be fortified (sometimes by law) with vitamins to try to put back the nutritional value we destroyed. Moreover, even our whole foods these days may be as much as
40% less nutritious than 50 years ago. While I always tried to ensure my diet provided all of my vitamins/minerals, I liked the idea of having a multivitamin there to back me up. Unfortunately, as discussed in
this article, more and more research seems to be indicating that multivitamins might not be effective at all.
But even if they weren't always effective, I thought that taking one multivitamin per day was unlikely to do any harm. This too may be incorrect, as discussed in
this article. Not only have a number of studies shown multivitamins to have no benefit, in some cases, they have been found to be harmful. Excessive intake of various vitamins - which would be hard to achieve with food alone, but possible with vitamin pills containing several hundred percent of RDA - has been linked to various diseases, including cancer. Moreover,
an article on cnn.com discusses a ConsumerLab's report that "found that more than half of the 21 multis it tested had too much (or too little) of certain vitamins -- or had been contaminated with dangerous substances such as lead." It seems like the popular brands that most people (including myself) use are ok, but still a bit disconcerting.
However, what really made me reconsider multivitamins was Michael Pollan's book
In Defense of Food (his New York Times article
Unhappy Meals is a shorter version of the arguments he makes in his book). Pollan discusses that nutritionists/scientists still have a very poor understanding of what it takes to make a healthy human diet. Originally, scientists only recognized carbs, fat and protein as relevant to sustaining human health. When diseases like scurvy and beriberi popped up, they recognized the importance of vitamins. Then they became aware of distinctions between different types of carbs (high GI, low GI), proteins (different amino acids), and fats (omega 3, omega 6, saturated, unsaturated, etc). Now we also talk about fiber, polyphenlos, carotenes and who knows what else. Scientists keep trying to break food down into its parts and to come up with a formula - an RDA - of what we need to be healthy, but I think it's pretty clear that we are failing badly. Humans have managed to live healthy lives for thousands of years on a huge variety of diets - from high fat to low fat, high carb to low carb, exclusively vegetarian to exclusively animal product, and so on. It seems that the one diet that invariably makes us unhealthy is the western diet, despite our obsession with macronutrients, vitamins, RDA's, supplements and so on.
The point is that I'm no longer taking a multivitamin not because I don't think they work or are dangerous, but because I don't think scientists really know what the human body needs to be healthy. Sure, macronutrients, vitamins, fiber, etc are all probably part of it. But who knows what is missing? We are constantly identifying one substance after another in food that turns out to be incredibly important for our health and then generating pills and fortifying our food products with it. So why waste time waiting for these discoveries? Stop eating processed food and you don't have to worry about what your diet is "missing". Eat a varied diet of real, whole food, and you're just about guaranteed to get enough of every substance you need.
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