Ever walk into the drugstore (or worse, a specialty supplement store) in search of a multivitamin only to find yourself wandering up and down aisles crammed with towering stacks of pill bottles, wondering what it was you came for?
You see 10 kinds of daily multivitamins: formulations for women, formulations for men and formulations for seniors, kids and teens; "mega" formulas; energy formulas; and formulas with and without iron.
Which one should you take? And what's the difference?
The answer is that you might be better off skipping the trip altogether and avoiding the expense and the bewilderment, some experts say. With a healthy diet, there's no reason most people need to take a daily multivitamin and little evidence that there's any health benefit to them anyway, they say.
One might think it would be smart to take a vitamin supplement, with that national diet heavy on fast food drenched in oil and washed down with pop.
But there's more danger in your expanding waistline than in the possibility of developing a vitamin deficiency from eating this way, says Kathleen Houck, a clinical dietitian at Akron General Hospital.
"Obesity has its whole constellation of health problems," she says. "It's not that you're going to become deficient."
On the other side of the great supplement debate, though, are plenty of doctors and dietitians who recommend you take a multivitamin to ensure against a diet that probably doesn't always measure up.
Dr. Michael Roizen, chief wellness officer at the Cleveland Clinic, suggests half a multivitamin, twice a day as an "insurance policy."
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