One third of American adults take multivitamins, beleiving them to be beneficial to their health, despite little evidence in previous studies.
Now, a new study involving almost 400,000 people has found zero benefit from multivitamin use in helping people live longer.
Erikka Loftfield and her team, from the Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics at the U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI) concluded that people: “without a history of major chronic diseases, we did not find evidence to support improved longevity among healthy adults who regularly take multivitamins,”
The new study was published on June 26th in the journal JAMA Network Open.
The study analyzed data from three prospective studies (meaning people were followed over time) with an average 27 years of follow-up.
A whopping total of over 390,000 healthy adults were enrolled in the studies, and they averaged about 61 years of age upon study entry.
Over the nearly three decades of follow-up, almost 165,000 of the participants died. About 50,000 deaths were attributed to cancer, about 35,000 deaths were caused by heart disease and 9,275 deaths were linked to strokes.
Loftfield’s group detected no association between multivitamin use and a person’s odds of dying within the study period.
In fact, “we found that daily multivitamin use vs nonuse was associated with 4% higher mortality [death] risk,” the researchers said.
People’s race, ethnicity, education or dietary quality didn’t alter the results.
{Matzav.com}