Despite what I'm telling you, many "experts" out there are not recommending that you take a multivitamin/mineral supplement.
They often claim that if you eat a well-rounded diet then you don't ever need a vitamin and mineral supplement. This, of course, is the advice given by "experts" who either don't live in reality or are very uneducated about supplements and the American diet.
For starters, most Americans do NOT eat a well-rounded diet, which means that they are not getting in optimal amounts of critical vitamins and minerals and/or may even be deficient in certain ones.
Many American don't even know the difference between protein and carbohydrates. So how can they be expected to eat a well-rounded diet? It's unrealistic. Plus, eating enough food to provide you adequate amounts of all the micronutrients would likely provide you far too many macronutrients—meaning too many calories, which would make you fat.
Another issue that makes this kind of recommendation nonsensical has to do with the diminishing quality of our food supply.
Even if you were careful to eat a well-rounded diet, you may not be getting in adequate amounts of critical micronutrients. That's because our food supply today is lower in many of these vitamins and minerals due to conventional farming practices such as over-farming, which diminishes the nutrient density of the soil. The grain-feeding that conventional cattle and chickens are getting also diminishes the micronutrient content of milk, beef, eggs, and chicken.
Additionally, certain foods inhibit the absorption of some micronutrients.
Refined sugars—as well as white-flour products like white bread—can lower blood levels of minerals such as zinc and magnesium. Foods rich in calcium like dairy products inhibit absorption of both zinc and magnesium by the small intestines as well. Foods rich in phytates—phosphorous compounds found in whole grain breads, cereals, and legumes—also hinder the absorption of zinc by the small intestines.
A third issue that makes skipping a multi bad advice is micronutrient loss in the individual.
Most people who are careful to try and eat a well-rounded diet tend to also workout. Research shows that many athletes who train intensely—and if you follow my training programs you are essentially an "athlete"—you lose many critical vitamins and minerals, such as B vitamins, vitamin C, chromium, selenium, zinc, magnesium, and copper.
This is due to a variety of factors, such as loss of the minerals in sweat and urine, as well as their increased use for energy production during the workout as well as recovery and protein synthesis following training. So you're starting at a deficit and eating food that may be at a deficit, which makes a multivitamin/mineral supplement an absolute necessity.
Some doctors and nutritionists have even gone so far as to say that taking vitamin and mineral supplements can be dangerous.
This is based on some poorly done and very biased studies suggesting the ridiculous: that vitamin and mineral supplements can harm your health. The most recent study was from the University of Minnesota. The researchers used data from over 38,000 elderly women in the Iowa Women's Health Study, which was based simply on questionnaires about supplement use in 1986, 1997 and 2004. They concluded that the use of multivitamins, vitamin B6, folic acid, iron, magnesium, zinc, and copper was associated with a slight increased risk of death. Of course, there are numerous flaws with the study that make it irrelevant to you.
Not only was the study done in elderly women, but it didn't actually provide subjects any of these supplements, it simply relied on their recall of taking them. That is the most unreliable info you can use in a study and is far from scientific. Another factor to consider in this study is what is known as the "sick-user effect". This refers to the fact that when many people are diagnosed with a disease, they then tend to start taking supplements in hope for an alternative cure. This doesn't mean that the supplements increased their risk of death, but their disease did and it was just coincidental that they then started taking supplements.
On top of all this, the study was published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, which is a journal of the American Medical Association (AMA)— known to be staunch supporters of the pharmaceutical industry, and strongly opposed to the supplement industry for obvious reasons.
The truth of the matter is that studies that show that vitamin and mineral supplements are beneficial far outnumber those claiming that they don't.