Best Multivitamin Brands

With literally hundreds of multivitamins available on the market, determining the best multivitamin brands can seem daunting. It is all the more important because supplementing your normal diet with multivitamins is an effective way to stay healthy. This is especially useful for people with special dietary and health requirements, including the elderly, expectant mothers, younger children, and pre- and post-menopausal women.

A brief overview of the most popular brands may help you evaluate the different multivitamin brands available today.

The Centrum A to Zinc range is a trusted and recognized brand on the market, and is the one brand that is most frequently recommended by doctors.

Centrum offers several vitamin pill options. The main Centrum product is a complete, one-a-day multivitamin. It is formulated to support your immune system with essential antioxidants and vitamin C, to aid muscle function with magnesium and vitamin D, and to help support bone healthy with calcium and vitamin C.

Centrum Complete A to Zinc contains 18 milligrams of iron, making it a good choice for women who are planning a pregnancy. It also contains 500 milligrams of folic acid, which is essential to help to prevent conditions such as spina bifida and anencephaly, two birth defects that generally develop during pregnancy. Centrum is a also a good vitamin choice for pre-menopausal women, because its iron and folic acid content effectively replaces these nutrients that are lost during menstruation.

The Centrum product range offers other multivitamin products, including:

• Centrum Silver - formulated for the over-50s consumer, with higher levels of vitamin B12 and other age-appropriate vitamins
• Centrum Performance - formulated to help energize both body and mind
• Centrum Cardio - formulated to maintain a healthy heart
• Centrum Kids - specially formulated to keep children healthy

Getting young children to take the recommended daily intake of vitamins and minerals through their diet can be challenging, particularly if they are fussy eaters. Complicating matters is getting younger children to swallow vitamin pills. Enter Flintstones Children's Complete Chewable Vitamins.

While there are several multivitamin brands on the market for children, this is an especially popular brand. These chewable pills are child-friendly and fruit-flavored. The packaging is themed on the classic animated sitcom The Flintstones, featuring Fred, Wilma and other fun Flintstones characters. More importantly, the brand is formulated to provide the appropriate daily requirement of vitamins and minerals for children's healthy growth and development.

As its name suggests, this brand is especially formulated for men. It is notable that One-A-Day Men’s Health Formula contains no iron at all. This is because clinical studies show that a high intake of iron from supplements increases the risk of heart disease.

The One-A-Day Men’s formula is specifically designed to provide a unique combination of essential vitamins and minerals for male health concerns. For example, it contains Lycopene, Selenium, Zinc and Vitamin E to support prostrate health, one of the leading male health concerns. While there isn't any conclusive evidence directly linking these nutrients to the prevention of prostate cancer, the brand does not contain them in high enough levels to pose a health risk.

While reviews on dollar and discount store multivitamin brands are not encouraging, reputable store brands have been found to just as effective as the more expensive brand name multivitamins. One such store brand is Walgreen's Advanced Formula A Thru Z, which has been found to compare favorably to Centrum Complete A to Zinc. It provides the same vitamins, but at less than half the price. As you compare the different multivitamins available on the market, store brand multivitamins may offer a less expensive alternative to the best multivitamins brands.

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