Vitamins are the biggest con of your life

Do you need to take a vitamin?

Gwyneth Paltrow seems to think the answer is yes. Her new Goop-branded monthly vitamin packs, which cost $90 each and sport names like “Why Am I So Effing Tired” and “High School Genes,” claim to deliver a number of health benefits, from energy-boosting to metabolism-speeding.

But there’s a problem.

Study after scientific study has found that taking vitamins does not result in any such wellness perks, suggesting that most of the nutrients inside either end up in the toilet or are flushed out of your body in other ways.

If taking vitamins improves our health, then we’d expect to see those benefits clearly in large, long-term, well-controlled studies. We haven’t.

A large recent review published in the Annals of Internal Medicine of 27 trials of vitamins (3 focused on multivitamins and 24 on single or paired ones) involving more than 400,000 people concluded that people who took them did not live longer, get fewer cases of heart disease, or get fewer cases of cancer than people who did not take vitamins. Another big, long-term study published last month in the Journal of the American Medical Association which divided nearly 6,000 men into groups and gave them either a placebo or one of 4 supplements touted for their brain-protecting abilities found no decreased prevalence of dementia among any of the supplement-taking groups.

Read on at this link