Listen, I’m a huge fan of vitamins and minerals. In fact, I write about them all the time.
But apparently, getting your vitamins and minerals by way of a multivitamin is not going to cut it for your health.
One guy, Howard Sesso, in Boston had a sneaking suspicion that this might be the case, so he decided to make a study out of to officially answer his question, once and for all.
You see, more than half of American adults take a multivitamin every day in hopes of 
gleaning the benefits that are known to be associated with the vitamins packed into the tiny pill.
The problem? If their diets are trash, then they still couldn’t expect to see true benefits or improvements.
At least, that’s what the findings of Sesso’s study reported.
Sesso tracked 14,000 male doctors over the age of 50 who reported taking a daily multivitamin for 11 years. He expected to see that the multivitamin would reduce the risk of heart disease among this group since, you know, multivitamins are supposed to prevent basically everything.
What he actually found was that there was no reduction in heart disease at all compared to a normal population of men over 50 in the US.
So, why did this happen?
Because at the end of the day, our bodies were designed to move each day and survive off of the nutrition that is abundant in nature.
Basically, we are meant to exercise regularly and eat whole foods.
When we don’t do that, it doesn’t matter what gimmicks we try; our bodies will not function at their best.
While many doctors concede that a multivitamin can definitely pick up the slack when diet and exercise aren’t enough, it seems like it can’t pick up the slack for a sedentary lifestyle with a trash diet.
This makes sense chemically, as well. Some vitamins and minerals are best absorbed in combination with other substances, namely those found naturally in whole foods.
When you simply pop a multivitamin in the mornings, your body can’t really metabolize like we all hope that it can, and instead, you end up peeing most of it out within a couple of hours (which is why multivitamins sometimes give your pee a funky smell or color).
So, sorry to say it: a whole foods diet and regular exercise still seem to be the best way to improve your health.
[expand title=”References“]
Health Day. URL Link. Accessed April 13, 2017.
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