Multivitamin
Silver· human dataBroad 'insurance' with little outcome benefit in well-fed people, but low risk.
A multivitamin provides small amounts of many micronutrients as broad nutritional 'insurance'. For people already eating a reasonably varied diet, large trials have found little benefit to hard outcomes like heart disease, cancer or mortality.
That said, they are low-risk and can help fill genuine gaps — for restrictive diets, certain life stages, or erratic eating. The better strategy is usually a good diet plus targeted correction of any tested shortfall, rather than relying on a multivitamin to do the work.
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Written and reviewed by Mathew Beale, MSc Biotechnology, University of Reading.
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