There are 30 million Italians who regularly use food supplements. Numbers that see us in first place in Europe, with a market that in 2022 recorded a turnover of over four billion euros. Experts have long warned that in many cases it is a fad not supported by scientific data, and that supplementation with food supplements should be recommended only in case of deficiencies. And a new study just published in the journal Jama Network Open seems to prove them right: the research, which involved 400 thousand American adults, did not in fact identify any benefit in terms of longevity for those who take multivitamin supplements.
The study, conducted by researchers at the National Cancer Institute, used data collected since the 1990s from three large American studies, which followed a total of 390,000 healthy adults for at least 20 years, to study the effects of lifestyle on health. Participants were asked to report their daily consumption of multivitamins, and so the researchers were able to calculate the effects of these dietary supplements on the risk of dying from any cause over the 20 years covered by the studies.
In total, about 165,000 deaths were recorded among the participants during the study period. Cross-referencing the data with those on multivitamin consumption revealed that dietary supplements do not appear to show any positive effect on the risk of dying from cancer, heart disease or cerebrovascular disease.
Indeed: if you look closely, the results show a small increased risk of early death in the first years after starting to take multivitamins. A phenomenon whose cause, however, is impossible to establish: as the researchers write in their study, it could be linked to a harmful effect of the supplements, but also to the fact that people start using food supplements when they don’t feel well, or discover of being affected by some pathology.
Ultimately, research confirms that taking supplements and multivitamins is useless in people who do not have specific deficiencies or specific pathologies. And that in healthy people, therefore, attention should go towards a healthy and varied diet, and not pills and supplements. “Shifting the focus of nutritional interventions on foods, rather than supplements, could provide the benefits for longevity that multivitamins fail to give us,” we read in an editorial published in the same issue of Jama that hosts the research. “Vegetables, fruit, legumes and cereals, for example, are a classic of many areas where the population proves to be extremely long-lived”.