Daily Vitamin Supplements

The Case For Daily Vitamin Supplements

Fast food, TV dinners and glow-in-the-dark cereal may have token amounts of vitamins added, but truth is most highly processed foods have ruined much of the good stuff by the time it actually ends up on your plate. Adding insult to injury, the average American is pretty bad about eating his or her vegetables. The long-term result is pretty sorry, with minor to serious deficiencies across the board.

Fortunately, you can remedy this with a minimum of effort by simply popping a pill or two each morning, supplying you with everything you need. Ta-daa, bases covered. Having said that, daily vitamin supplements are not a license to live off Domino's and KFC. You need healthy, varied food; vitamins merely pick up the slack.

Potential Drawbacks

In today's globalized world, manufacturers get ingredients where they're cheap. That sometimes mean third-world countries where safety standards are low and oversight is lax. Beware of bargains, as cutting corners to keep costs low may mean the introduction of some nasty contaminant you definitely don't want.

If all you take is one over-the-counter multivitamin, you're probably okay, but if you start mixing your own cocktail of vitamins and minerals, you have to pay attention to your total daily intake of each thing. Some vitamins, like C or B vitamins, can be chugged to your heart's delight; what you don't need is flushed out, and the worst you'll probably experience is an upset stomach. Others, like vitamin E and minerals like iron, tend to accumulate in the body and can turn toxic if you continuously overdose on them.

What to Look For

There are a few things to keep in mind when shopping for your daily vitamin supplements.

• Reputable brand The twice marked-down bottle of 99 cent vitamins by a brand you've never heard of with misspellings on the label probably isn't a wise investment. Like always, you tend to get what you pay for. Sites like ConsumerLabs.com can help you pinpoint the good stuff.

• Absorbability You can take the world's purest, most potent vitamin supplement. But if you encase it in an impenetrable shell, it won't do you any good, right? Likewise, some pills are just to tough a nut to crack for your gut to digest completely. Get powder-filled capsules, or do the vinegar test at home.

• Freshness You wouldn't buy milk that was three days past its expiration date. Make sure you don't make that mistake with your vitamins either. The use-by date should be so far into the future you'll have used up the entire bottle well before that.

• Special considerations Many vegetarians, especially women, tend to get low on iron since they don't eat red meat. Others are getting to the age where osteoporosis is a concern and calcium intake becomes more important. There are plenty of specialty products formulated for situations like this, so don't just grab the first thing you see on the shelf.

• Sneaky dosages Finally, don't be taken in by conmen pulling fast ones with dosages. Comparing two 180 cap bottles by equally reputable brands where one is $40 and the other $30 may seem like a no-brainer. But wait until you get home and discover that the $30 pills were mostly filler, so you have to chug four capsules per day, while the $40 bottle was concentrated enough to accomplish the same with just one cap. In other words, you bought a 45 day supply for $30 instead of a 180 day supply for $40.