When you come to our online store you may be wondering “which
supplements should I take?” for which the answer is always,
unfortunately, “It depends”
supplements should I take?” for which the answer is always,
unfortunately, “It depends”
It depends because supplements may or may not benefit you based on
your current goals, and so the best strategy is to ask what supplements
do and then match your needs to that. Whenever we’re looking to find
the benefit of a supplement (or do anything related to our health, really)
it’s important to look to the evidence. We use creatine – why? – well,
because it’s one of the most well supported supplements in existence,
and has been demonstrated to improve power, hypertrophy, strength, and
a host of other things.
The problem is, however, that not all things that are highly effective are
so easy to study.
When it comes to multivitamins, for example, there are a few issues:
- There is no consensus on what constitutes a multivitamin (does it need everything? Most things? Do they have minerals or are multiminerals a different thing? What dosage counts?) meaning thatstudies aren’t always easy to compare
- People who use multis are more likely to be health conscious, meaning they already do a bunch of healthy things including eating well and exercising, which could mask how useful these supplements are
And then there’s the big one – in order to ask if multivitamins are effective
or not, we need to outline what exactly it is that multivitamins are
supposed to ‘do’.
This is easy when looking at something like creatine because what it’s
supposed to do, is to increase levels of phosphocreatine in your muscles
and so enable you to train harder, resulting in more progress. This could
be considered to be a positive benefit in that the good thing it does
provides a boost.
Multivitamins, on the other hand, aren’t there to increase your health.
They’re there to prevent your health from deteriorating due to an
inadequate intake of the micronutrients that are provided. This could be
considered to be a negative benefit in that the benefit is in avoiding harm,
rather than improving something that already exists.
And it turns out that this is hard to really measure in randomised
controlled trials, because the negative thing you’re avoiding won’t happen
for DECADES. This means we have to rely on observational research if we
want empirical evidence but the issues there are explained above already.
In instances such as this, it can be useful to look at evidence that is one-
step removed from the direct effect of multivitamins themselves on health
outcomes. One simple way to do this is to ask the question: If we
supplement with individual micronutrients can this be demonstrated to
correct deficiencies? And the answer here is overwhelmingly yes. When
we consider this alongside the fact that ensuring micronutrient sufficiency
is good for health (that’s pretty self-evident, it’s what micronutrient
sufficiency means!), then multivitamin supplementation starts to make a
ton of sense!
outcomes. One simple way to do this is to ask the question: If we
supplement with individual micronutrients can this be demonstrated to
correct deficiencies? And the answer here is overwhelmingly yes. When
we consider this alongside the fact that ensuring micronutrient sufficiency
is good for health (that’s pretty self-evident, it’s what micronutrient
sufficiency means!), then multivitamin supplementation starts to make a
ton of sense!
