If you were raised to believe that multivitamins were essential for your health, it’s time to bring your thinking into the 21st century.
These days, we can get most of the vitamins we need from a healthy diet. Not only that, but it’s been found that too much of any one vitamin can actually be bad for you. One study in 2012 found that women who took vitamin supplements over the long term had higher mortality risk than those who didn’t.
So which ones do you actually need?
- Vitamin D. This is particularly difficult to get from food, and hard to get from sunlight in the winter. A vitamin D supplement every day can’t hurt.
- Zinc. This vitamin is difficult to get enough of in your food, and zinc supplements have been found to treat the common cold. These are a pretty safe bet.
- Folic acid. This one is just for pregnant women, or women who want to get pregnant. Bodies need more of this when they’re pregnant. It also helps prevent birth defects.
Which ones do you skip, then?
- Vitamin C. That’s right, this vitamin is probably not really doing anything to help your cold. Studies have shown that it doesn’t actually provide the cold prevention powers it says it does, and too much vitamin C can actually up your risk of kidney stones.
- Vitamin B3. You can skip the supplement, but you can get easily from salmon or tuna. You don’t need any more than that, since like vitamin C, this vitamin doesn’t have any of the benefits it’s supposed to, such as reducing heart attack and stroke risk.
- Vitamin E. This is another one that’s just overprescribed. Eating spinach gives you plenty of vitamin e, and too much of it actually has been found to increase men’s risk of prostate cancer.
