(Keepingthenetweird.com)

Keepingthenetweird.com

What are the recommended vitamins or supplements that you should be taking on a daily basis? It’s a question that many people don’t know the answer to, so I decided that I’d do a little research to figure it out. What I found was really what I expected to find. It all boils down to keeping it simple – in other words, you don’t need to pop 20 different supplements a day to stay healthy. As a matter of fact, that can be extremely unhealthy!

According to Harvard School of Public Health, the majority of people should be simply taking one multivitamin daily, and they also point out that taking an extra Vitamin D supplement on a daily basis can be beneficial to your health as well. There’s no need to take an individual pill for each vitamin/mineral (i.e., vitamin E, vitamin C, blah, blah, blah) – it’s a waste of money, and it isn’t necessarily “better” for you anyway.

A daily multivitamin will “fill in the gaps” where your daily food intake falls short of the recommended amount of nutrients – although it’s very important to point out that your daily food intake is far more important than the vitamins and minerals you get from a daily multivitamin, so don’t think that you can eat at McDonalds three times a day and still be healthy simply by popping a One-a Day!

The Harvard study didn’t point out specific multivitamin brands as being better than the other, so I would assume that Centrum, One-a-Day, and other “Off-Brands” will all do the trick pretty much equally. So don’t waste your money buying the most expensive “luxury” brand multivitamin from some fancy healthy catalog or something – stick to the basic stuff. I’ll dig further into the quality aspect of multivitamins in future posts to see if one brand is better than the other, but for now, I say just go with the brand that makes your wallet happy.

You can pick-up multivitamins and/or vitamin D supplements from almost any grocery store, health store, pharmacy, or online pharmacy. Reputable online pharmacies offer greater convenience and often times better prices, so it’s definitely worth comparing prices with your local pharmacy.