><i>In this cohort study of 390 124 generally healthy adults with more than 20 years of follow-up, daily multivitamin use was not associated with a mortality benefit.</i><p>Aren't most of them the kind of people that are generally middle class and above types, with access to better nutrition and healthcare, and the associated mindset for health improvement, that's a prerequisite to consistently buy and consume multivitamins?<p>That is, the kind of people to not have many vitamin deficiencies to begin with, compared to some working class person who can't afford time to cook, nor had such ideals instilled upon them since childhood, and eats fast food and microwaved stuff 24/7...<p>I'd like to see how e.g. adding multivitamins to industrial foodstuff consumed by poorer families, in the school lunches of poor districts, and so on, improves or doesn't improve health outcomes...
I don't think people take it to improve longevity. I take it because I have periods of times when I can't eat well enough and I can feel myself getting sluggish. Multivitamin actually help me feeling a little better in those periods (it may be a placebo but I would prefer a test on that specifically instead of longevity)
I'm more interested in finding out if multivitamins improve quality of life and reduce instances of disease. You can have both and not have an increase in longevity. For me, I feel as if I need multivitamin I take daily or I don't feel as well mentally or physically.
They didn't specify what they qualified as a multivitamin, my guess is that the definition is rather loose due to the scale of the study. There's a lot of different mixes of multivitamins in the store. You would buy the one that fit's the efficiency pattern you want to prevent. If your goal is to specifically reduce mortality rather than prevent short term fatigue, you would need to pick the right one.<p>From what I can tell, they haven't ensure that the long term consumption pattern was consistent either, so they may be mixing people who took multivitamins for a year around the initial study with those who took it every day for their whole life. That would reduce the effect size significantly.<p>The general advice on vitamin supplements is usually to take the ones you have explicit reasons for taking and to focus more on food in general. This study, while possible useful as a way to debunk highly unrealistic claims of multivitamin effectiveness, doesn't really change the picture here.
From the conclusion section:<p><pre><code> MV use was not associated with lower all-cause
mortality risk in the first (multivariable-adjusted
HR, 1.04; 95% CI, 1.02-1.07) or second (multivariable-
adjusted HR, 1.04; 95% CI, 0.99-1.08) halves of
follow-up.
</code></pre>
Do I read this correctly, that the hazard rate in the multivitamin group was 4% higher than in the non-multivitamin group?<p>And do I read the CI of 1.02-1.07 correctly in that this difference is statistically significant?
Related:<p><i>The Limited Value of Multivitamin Supplements</i><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40828179">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40828179</a>
Hello everyone, I believe that the studies done so far have considered all possible variables such as different ethnicities, lifestyles in general as well as the health conditions of the various subjects. However, they have forgotten the most important variable, which is the quality of the ingredients in multi-vitamins. We cannot assume that a hatchback can perform as well as a Porsche, even if they are both cars. All supplements still have no real discipline and, as yet, there are no testing requirements for manufacturers. Raw materials are of vegetable origin and are imported from third countries without any quality guarantee. Supplements often contain bacterial contaminants such as aflatoxins, heavy metals, active ingredient titres that do not correspond to those declared, and dosage variations from batch to batch can have an effect on human health.
Glauco
I thought it was well known that we cannot determine how well it absorbs into the body in isolation like this?<p>Also a lot of seemingly textbook examples of the placebo effect in this thread<p>I take multivitamins but acknowledge they may be doing nothing more than placebo
Yet another statistical analysis of self reported questionnaire about if death can be avoided by something.<p>How about other measures of one's life before the inevitable? Life quality that is there not only for those with diabetes, cancer or cardiovascular problems having less or more known mechanism that (as far as I am aware) not strongly correlates (yet has casual effect) to the consumption of vitamins. I am the only one tired of these statistical analyses with insignificant deviation smearing billions of aspects together through general public created guided data drawing grandiose conclusions only in titles, while the scope of the title is also very limited despite playing the tune of primal fear to inflate its self importance beyond the content?