Multivitamins don’t just help keep us at optimum health but also slow down ageing – if you believe the headlines this week.
But perhaps we should think twice before we stock up. Most previous research into multivitamins has given results that are disappointingly underwhelming.
And even the latest trial’s findings are less promising than they first seem.
“My personal advice is to stop taking multivitamins, whether in pill or gummy form,” said Professor Pilar Guallar Castillón, a lecturer at the Autonomous University of Madrid, who was not involved in the study. “Eat a healthy, varied diet rich in fruit and vegetables, and do not waste your money on nutritional supplements.”
Here’s why many doctors say that, apart from in a few groups of people, taking a daily multivitamin and multimineral tablet is probably a waste of money.
The wonder pills
The role of vitamins in health emerged in the last century as doctors realised that, in some very malnourished groups of people, certain diseases could be cured by supplementing their diet with particular nutritious foods.
Scurvy, for instance, when people have bleeding gums and poor wound healing, is caused by lack of vitamin C, and can be prevented by eating citrus fruit. A condition called beri beri, involving muscle and nerve damage, is caused by lack of vitamin B1, found in whole grains.
There are now at least 28 different vitamins or minerals recognised as essential for the diet. But most people on a varied diet usually get enough of them and do not need to take extra.
When to take vitamins
In some cases people need to take extra vitamins, according to the NHS. Vegetarians and vegans may need to take vitamin D, vitamin B12, iodine, selenium, calcium and iron, as these nutrients are found in meat and dairy products.
Pregnant women and those trying to conceive should take a B vitamin called folic acid and vitamin D. Children under five are supposed to take vitamins A, C and D.
And everyone is supposed to take vitamin D over winter, as the weak British sunshine doesn’t let us make enough through our skin.
Despite the lack of official support for a daily multivitamin, they are incredibly popular, with 41 per cent of all people who take a supplement opting for a multivitamin, according to Food Standards Agency research.
Depending on the brand and exactly what’s in the pills, they can cost anywhere from a few pounds to over £30 a month, and people may also top them up with extras such as fish oil capsules.
Such supplements are often assumed to act like a kind of health panacea or insurance policy in case your diet is lacking. In fact, there is little evidence to suggest that people on a typical varied diet need a multivitamin.
In trials that looked at whether taking a multivitamin could reduce deaths from common causes, like cancer or heart disease, or total deaths, the results were disappointing, usually finding no effect.
Indeed, vitamin C and the large group of B vitamins cannot be stored in the body and so if they cannot be immediately used by the body they are excreted, leading to what sceptics sometimes call “expensive urine”. There have been suggestions from research that higher doses of vitamins can even be harmful.
Multivitamin versus chocolate
The latest study might at first glance seem to be an exception to the generally negative research evidence. This was part of a trial funded by a firm called Haleon, which makes a multivitamin and multimineral pill, and Mars, to see if either the supplement or cocoa extracts could slow cognitive ageing.
A smaller group of nearly 1,000 people in the trial also had blood samples taken to see if the vitamins or cocoa affected their rate of general healthy ageing, as gauged by tracking chemical changes to their DNA, known as epigenetic markers. These DNA changes normally accumulate over time.
Unluckily for Mars – and chocolate lovers – the cocoa extract had no effect. But in people taking the multivitamin pill, their rate of epigenetic ageing was slightly slowed, by the equivalent of two months over the two-year trial. It has been published in the journal Nature Medicine.
And yet, it is still too soon to conclude that multivitamins really can slow ageing, other scientists believe.
When ageing clocks tell different times
Firstly, DNA clocks are still a relatively new and emerging field. There are several different ways of measuring how fast they tick, depending on which areas of DNA are chosen.
Different DNA clocks don’t always give the same results. Indeed, in this trial, the researchers tested all the blood samples with five clocks, and the multivitamin only slowed things down in two. “You can’t just test everything and pick the winners,” F Perry Wilson, a doctor and researcher at Yale School of Medicine, said on X.
The lead researcher, Dr Howard Sesso at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, said the results were only meant to be “hypothesis generating”, in other words, suggest directions for further research rather than producing results that should be acted on
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Dr Laura Sinclair, an ageing researcher at the University of Exeter, who was not involved with the trial, said: “I don’t think the evidence base is there yet for us to recommend anything beyond what’s already recommended on the NHS website about vitamins.
“What’s going to be the best at improving health and longevity is things like lifestyle. There’s not going to be a silver bullet of a dietary supplement.”
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