Are Multivitamin Supplements Really Essential to Your Health?

By Hien Chung

Are multivitamin supplements really necessary? In fact, yes; that's especially true if your diet is deficient and doesn't provide adequate nutrition, because they'll fill in the nutritional gaps your diet doesn't provide. That doesn't mean you can eat unhealthily all the time and get away with it, but multivitamin supplements can give you nutritional support if your diet is less than optimal.

Multivitamin vitamin supplements include vitamins as well as minerals. The minerals included are important to everyday health, and many people can be deficient in them. They include magnesium, iron, calcium and zinc. Multivitamin supplements also contain many different vitamins, as listed below.

Vitamin A is found in most multivitamin supplements. It's rare to be deficient in vitamin A unless you are elderly. However, vitamin A is necessary for your immune system to function at its best, and it is sometimes recommended to prevent certain types of birth defects or to prevent bone loss. However, vitamin A can be toxic in large doses, so it should never be taken to excess.

Beta carotene is an antioxidant in multivitamin supplements that helps increase white blood cell numbers and boosts the body's disease fighting immune activities. Together, vitamin A and beta carotene keep the cells in your eyes healthy.

Folic acid is especially important during pregnancy and is included in prenatal multivitamin supplements. Folic acid deficiencies can lead to low birth weight and an increased risk of neural tube defects such as spina bifida in babies.

There are quite a few B vitamins, and most of them are found in multivitamin supplements. Folic acid is technically a B vitamin. Pyridoxine is another. Along with B12, pyridoxine is important for controlling levels of homocysteine in the blood. High levels of homocysteine can lead to heart disease, strokes, and Alzheimer's disease. Vitamin B12 can also help fight heart disease, anemia, and memory loss. Thiamine, also called vitamin B1, is important for proper brain function. The vitamin niacin, also called B3, prevents a disease called pellagra. Pellagra is relatively rare, but it is caused by a deficiency in niacin and results in scaly sores on the skin, inflamed mucous membranes, diarrhea, and mental confusion.

Vitamin C strengthens your immune system and is an antioxidant. It helps keep your skin healthy, and aids in wound healing and in the prevention of scars.

Vitamin D is necessary to properly absorb calcium, a mineral. If you're deficient in vitamin D, you can experience fractures, bone loss, and a disease called rickets, which can lead to extreme bone pain. The body can manufacture Vitamin D if you have enough sunlight exposure, but it's usually included in multivitamin supplements because it can be difficult to get. However, it's toxic in large doses, so be careful how much you take.

Vitamin K, too, is another important vitamin, and its deficiency can cause osteoporosis (brittle bones), easy bruising, and bleeding.

Calcium is among the mega minerals that are important to good health, and is found in many multivitamin supplements. Along with vitamin D and vitamin K, it's necessary to your diet in order to maintain adequate bone mass. You need enough calcium in your diet or through multivitamin supplements for good health, and it also reduces the risk of fracture in bones for older people.

Multivitamin supplements can provide more than 100% of the recommended daily allowance of some vitamins, but in most cases, it's not safe to consume very large amounts of any vitamin or mineral by itself. The levels included in multivitamins are usually safe, but if you take too many supplements in individual form and too much of them, extremely large doses could be unsafe.

Although it's possible that your diet provides 100% of your recommended daily allowance of the necessary vitamins and minerals, it's relatively rare that any one person can do so every single day, especially with the lives most of us lead. There are lots of different multivitamin supplements available on the market, and you may need to do some research to decide which one is best for you. If you experience side effects when you begin to take a multivitamin supplement, stop taking the supplement and see if the problem subsides. If it does, ask your doctor to recommend a multivitamin supplement for you.

There are about a dozen recognized vitamins that humans are recommended to consume in certain quantities. A long term shortage in any of them can cause symptoms of vitamin deficiency. While multivitamin supplements can do a great job of preventing vitamin deficiencies, they're not a substitute for a healthy lifestyle, including a healthy diet and regular exercise.