Ask Dr Google if you need to take vitamins, and you’ll get the emphatic answer that, no, you don’t, as you get all the nutrients you need from eating a healthy, balanced diet. Ask the more pointed question, “Are vitamins a waste of money?”and you get an even more muscular response that not only would you do better flushing your dollars down a toilet, but supplements may even damage your health.
And that is the standard medical view about vitamins today, even though more than 70 percent of Americans take at least one multivitamin daily, spending around $12 billion a year in the process.
After pushing the balanced diet approach for years, the American Medical Association begrudgingly accepted that, at least, vitamins probably didn’t do any harm. But this position changed in 2019 when a major study concluded
