Do multivitamins work? Are
multivitamins just a waste of money? This is an ongoing question, and the
answers seem to change with the ebb and flow of supplement and wellness
marketing trends. I have broken down some of the basic questions around multivitamins
that I receive, and provided information to help make more informed decisions
when choosing whether or not to take them.

Are Multivitamins Necessary?

It depends on who you ask. The nutritional supplement industry,
with it’s roughly $60-billion in US sales alone, will respond with a
resounding “yes!” However, if you start asking the experts, you
might find a different answer. More and more doctors are acknowledging that
extracting (a.k.a. isolating) a single nutrient or vitamin and putting it
into a pill may not be the best way to deliver the nutrition to our bodies.
 “We believe
that the case is closed — supplementing the diet of well-nourished adults
with (most) mineral or vitamin supplements has no clear benefit and might
even be harmful,” concluded the authors of an
editorial summarizing the new research papers, published Dec. 16, 2013
in the Annals of Internal Medicine. “These vitamins should not be used for
chronic disease prevention. Enough is enough.” They went on to urge consumers
to not “waste” their money on multivitamins. Further research on this subject
revealed to me many doctors and experts making similar
statements.

Do We Actually Digest & Absorb Multivitamins?

Well, not exactly. I have heard claim after claim, made mostly by
vitamin sales reps and independent distributors, about the “high
absorption rate” of various products. The fact is, there is no true way
to measure the absorption “rate” of a vitamin product. Many
suggest that taking vitamins with food increases absorption. But if you don’t
know which vitamins are water soluble, and which ones are fat soluble, how
are you really going to know which vitamins to take with which foods? Also,
many vitamin pills contain far more than the recommended daily allowance of
whatever vitamin they are delivering. Our bodies have a natural regulating
mechanism, meaning no matter how much vitamin C you ingest, your body is only
going to use what it needs. The rest gets discarded, or worse yet, left to
bog down your natural process of elimination, which eventually leads to
inflammation. In a sense, you could be literally harming yourself or
“flushing your money down the toilet.” On the other hand, if you
were to eat a variety of whole, mostly plant based foods, your body would
have all it needs of one vitamin, but would also be able to use all the other
bioavailable vitamins and other nutrients in the whole food that it needs to
achieve perfect health and balance.

So How Do I Know I Am Getting My Vitamins?

Here is a concept: How about eating real food? In his 2013 NY
bestseller Whole, Dr. Colin Campbell, (author of
another best seller The China
Study), explains the work of renowned researcher Dr. Rui Lai
Liu late last century. Dr Liu wanted to compare vitamin C from a fresh apple,
to the isolated vitamin C in a pill. What he discovered was that half a cup
of fresh apples had an antioxidant, vitamin C-like activity equivalent to
1,500 milligrams of vitamin C (about three times the amount in a typical
vitamin C supplement). However, when they chemically analyzed that half-cup
of apples, they found only 5.7 milligrams of vitamin C. Meaning, the vitamin
C-like activity in half a cup of whole apple was 263 times as potent as the
same amount of the isolated chemical. In other words, the specific chemical
we refer to as vitamin C accounts for less than 1 percent of the vitamin
C-like activity in a fresh apple. The other 99-plus percent of this activity
is due to other vitamin C-like chemicals in the apple. This
suggests that vitamin C can be much more effective in the context of the
whole apple than it is when consumed in an isolated (vitamin pill) form. It
makes sense to me that nature would have created a perfect way for you to get
more than enough of the vitamins you need from a delicious variety of fruits
and vegetables, hence the popular saying, “just eat all the colors of
the rainbow.”

Can You Really Get All Your Vitamins in Whole
Foods?

It depends on your diet. If you are a carnivore you can get all
your vitamins from whole foods, but you need to make sure you eat plenty of
colorful vegetables and fruit as well. If you are vegan, you can get all your
vitamins from whole foods, with  two exceptions. Vitamin B12 and D are
the only two vitamins not naturally synthesized in plant foods. Our
bodies make vitamin D from healthy, moderate exposure to sun light. Vitamin
B12 comes from bacteria that we would have access to if we didn’t habitually
wash it from our fruits and vegetables. Obviously, we aren’t going to stop
washing our food just so we can get vitamin B12. Since animals don’t wash
their food like humans, they naturally ingest and make vitamin B12 available
to us. Many vegans are aware that they may need to supplement their vitamin
B12.

So… Do Multivitamins work?

We can do ourselves a huge favor and probably save a lot of money,
by learning more about the true anatomy of a vitamin, how our bodies
absorb it, and where we might find it in our regular diet, before we go
running to the super sized bottle of multivitamins at the store. In the
very least, if you are convinced that your busy lifestyle and lack of nutrition
knowledge dictates that you supplement, it makes the most sense to me to turn
to products that deliver the vitamins you are looking for in a
whole
food supplement, like organic, live, raw, whole greens,
super-fruits, and protein from peas, brown rice, hemp and other
plants.
Bee pollen is another whole food, available in a supplement, that
delivers all the nutrients known to sustain life. I know those conventional
multivitamins at the market are conveniently tempting, but why not do some
exploring and invest a little time in some research before you make your next
vitamin purchase? Teach yourself how you can acquire the same variety of
vitamins, minerals, and nutrients from a more whole, minimally processed
source.