7315158252_2c80d18645_bAbout one in three Americans take a multivitamin. Is that helpful, harmful, or just a harmless waste of money? In 2011, the Iowa Women’s Health Study reported that multivitamin use was associated with a higherrisk of total mortality, meaning that women who took a multivitamin appeared to be paying to live shorter lives. But this was just an observational study—researchers didn’t split women up into two groups and put half on multivitamins to see who lived longer. All they did was follow a large population of women over time, and found that those that happened to be taking multivitamins were more likely to die. But maybe they were taking multivitamins because they were sick. The researchers didn’t find any evidence of that, but ideally we’d have a randomized, double-blind, placebo controlled trial, where thousands were followed for over a decade, with half given a multivitamin and half a placebo. That’s what we got the following year in 2012 with the Harvard Physicians’ Study II. And after a decade, the researchers found no effect on heart attack, stroke, or mortality.

The accompanying editorial concluded that multivitamins are a distraction from effective cardiovascular disease prevention. The message needs to remain simple and focused: heart disease can be largely prevented by healthy lifestyle changes.

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