A case in point popped up on the “Bodybuilding Revealed” forum recently…<\/p>\n
“What is the best multivitamin?”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
That’s a pretty, simple question… but I’ll be damned if I know the answer.\u00a0 I’m not sure what “best” even means, when it comes to multivitamins. To be perfectly honest, there are very few objective standards for evaluating a multi.\u00a0 The\u00a0few that come to my mind are:
\n<\/p>\n\n
- Label specifications (i.e. ,what’s on the label should be what’s in the bottle)<\/li>\n
- Completeness (i.e., the known essential nutrients should be covered)<\/li>\n
- Amounts (i.e., nutritionally significant amounts should be provided)<\/li>\n
- Bioavailability of individual nutrient sources<\/li>\n
- Price<\/li>\n
- Company (i.e., from an established company w\/a reputation for quality and good customer service)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Unfortunately, while this list can help us weed out poor products, it’s not a lot of\u00a0help when it comes to identifying\u00a0the very best ones.<\/p>\n
Many people assume “more is better” when it comes to a multi, but this assumption is often unwarranted.\u00a0 For one thing, many of the ancillary nutrients (like amino acids or food extracts) are likely to be “label decoration” – that is, supplied in amounts too small to be useful.\u00a0 Needless to state, these additional\u00a0ingredients often come at an additional cost, too.<\/p>\n
Likewise, the utility of providing very high doses of certain nutrients (250% – 10,000% of the RDA)\u00a0has yet to be established.\u00a0 While this may come as a shock to many people, there isn’t a whole lot of\u00a0science linking multivitamin use\u00a0to the prevention of disease (with the exception of deficiency diseases).\u00a0 While\u00a0megadoses of certain vitamins may have specific therapeutic uses (such as niacin for cholesterol reduction and CVD), it’s unclear what – if any – benefits there might be from chronic intake by healthy people.\u00a0 At the moment, Vitamin D is one of the few essential nutrients for which there’s a strong justification for consuming more than the RDA.<\/p>\n
Of course, in the case of water-soluble nutrients, such as the B-Vitamins and Vitamin C, there’s no real harm to it either…it’s just that\u00a0there’s no reason to\u00a0assume a product providing – say – 800% of the RDA for Vitamin C is better than one providing “only” 500%.<\/p>\n