Taking Too Many Multivitamins

Taking multivitamins has become part and parcel of life. Everyone you talk to probably encourages you to take multivitamin supplements. Even physicians agree. But do people really need to pop so many vitamin pills? Chances are you probably don’t need as many as you are popping, although multivitamins are certainly needed depending on your diet, age and gender. One thing is for sure; there is no one particular multivitamin product that can meet the needs of everyone. If you are over the age of 50, you should know that you need extra vitami
B12, but not too much iron. Children who are given multivitamins by their mothers may be taking too much vitami
A. Women need extra calcium in a separate supplement, as multivitamin products generally don’t contain any kind of calcium.

Reading the back of a multivitamin pack can often be quite confusing. Each product is tailor-made for different population segments. Vitamin A alone offers 14 different versions, while Men’s 50+Advantage offers several more versions. Even kids vitamins come in various brands. The Independent Institute of Medicine sets the recommended standard for minerals and vitamins. These dietary allowances differ from age to gender. The FDA, for the sake of convenience, requires a single daily value be set for dietary supplements, which is generally the highest needed.

These standards can be too high for certain people. The required dietary allowance in iron for men and postmenopausal women is 8 milligrams. The single daily value on the label is 18 milligrams. This amount is generally recommended for pregnant women. These statistics have remained the same since 1968 and have not been updated, even though the institute has recommended several changes for minerals and vitamins. There is no standard formula for multivitamins and in some cases the single daily value is completely off. The labels are known not to match the contents inside the bottle according to ConsumerLab. This supplement testing company claimed last week that they had tested 10 of 38 multivitamins brands and the some ingredients were either more or less, contradicting the label indication.

The trade group Council for Responsible Nutrition says they are concerned anytime ConsumerLab publish such claims, though the report put forward by ConsumerLab does not suggest the levels are doing any harm to consumers. You may wonder if multivitamins are necessary to include in your daily lifestyle. Multivitamins are likened to nutritional insurance. They are necessary for those not eating perfectly balanced meals.

Multivitamins were introduced as a dietary supplement in the 1940s. In 2008, multivitamins products had racked up $4.8 billion in sales. One third of adults in America regularly take multivitamins. Women, children, the elderly, the wealthy and physicians are high end users of this supplement. Looking at this demographic it seems that people with bad eating habits are less likely to consume multivitamins. Generally, people who include multivitamins into their daily lifestyle already lead healthy lives. So it is a difficult task to prove the good and bad effects of multivitamin on one’s overall health.