Do multivitamins improve health and prolong life? A study of 400,000 people answers
About a third of the American population takes pills that contain multivitamins, despite previous studies that indicate their effect is limited in improving overall health.
Now, a new study published by the scientific journal Jama Network Open, which included nearly 400,000 people, has shown that taking multivitamin pills does not help prolong life.
Researcher Erica Loftfield, from the US National Center for Cancer Research, said that for people who do not have a history of major chronic diseases, “we did not find any evidence that multivitamin pills help prolong life for people who take them on a regular basis.”
The research group, headed by Loftfeld, analyzed data from three studies that included more than 390,000 people who were followed up for an average of 27 years, and who were on average 61 years old at the start of the study.
During nearly three decades of continuous follow-up, approximately 165,000 volunteers in the experiment died, including 50,000 who died from cancer, 35,000 from heart disease, and about 9,275 who died from strokes.
According to the “Health Day” website, which specializes in medical research, the research team did not detect any link between taking multivitamin pills and the probability of death throughout the study period, stressing that the race, gender, nature of education, and type of volunteers’ diets did not affect the results of the research.
Source: websites