Why use a vitamin and mineral multiple supplement? These combinations are used for the purpose of health promotion and disease prevention. Sub-optimal intake of vitamins and minerals appear to be common even amongst those populations considered to have easy access to adequate food sources to meet classic vitamin deficiency diseases.
Recent evidence has shown that suboptimal levels of vitamins, even well above those causing deficiency syndromes, are risk factors for chronic diseases such as cardiovascular disease, cancer, and osteoporosis. A large proportion of the general population is apparently at increased risk for this reason. Most people do not consume an optimal amount of all vitamins by diet alone. … it seems prudent for all adults to take vitamin supplements.[1]
The premise that simply consuming enough nutrients from your diet – assuming your diet is adequate to do so, will prevent short term nutrient deficiency diseases is not an adequate argument when considering long term health and disease risk management. The inclusion of a well absorbed, balanced multivitamin and mineral nutritional supplement is most likely to have both short and long-term benefits if consumed on a regular basis.
Inadequate intake of specific nutrients may produce more than one disease, may produce diseases by more than one mechanism and may require several years for the consequent morbidity to be sufficiently evident to be clinically recognisable as disease. The intakes required to prevent many of the long latency diseases are higher than those required simply to prevent known initiating diseases, making recommendations based solely on preventing conditions such as Scurvy, Beri Beri etc, no longer biologically defensible.[2]
A high quality professional multivitamin and mineral product will present well absorbed, biologically active forms of vitamins and minerals in various ratios. There are different formulations to cater for the age and nutritional needs or specific requirements of an individual. Compliance will determine efficacy as much as the quality of the raw materials and ongoing daily supplementation satisfies short and long term goals associated with health promotion and optimisation of nutritional status.
References
Robert H. Fletcher; Kathleen M. Fairfield. Vitamins for Chronic Disease Prevention in Adults: Clinical Applications JAMA. 2002;287(23):3127-3129. View Abstract
Heaney RP. Long-latency deficiency disease: insights from calcium and vitamin D. Am J Clin Nutr. 2003 Nov;78(5):912-9. Review View Abstract
