Multiple Choice: How To Pick A Multivitamin

Nutrition Action Healthletter, April, 2000 by Bonnie Liebman

If the people who design the aisles in drug stores or health food stores had any sense, they'd put the vitamins next to the headache medicines. Whether you're shopping on foot or by mouse, sizing up the thousands of multivitamins/minerals is about as easy as sorting through your life insurance options.

Ironically, what makes it so tough to distinguish one multivitamin from another is that, at their core, they're largely the same. there are only so many vitamins and minerals, and except for some (mostly B) vitamins, their doses stay within a narrow range.

To differentiate one brand from another, marketers target some at men, women, or seniors. They use words like "high potency," "ultra," "mega," and "maximum." And they add ingredients like alfalfa, pumpkin seed, barley grass, and watercress.

Most of the differences are just for show. But some of them matter.

10 MULTIVITAMIN TRICKS

Not sure which multi to take? Supplement makers will try just about anything to boost profits or give their products an edge. Here are some common tricks to watch out for.

1 Missing Minerals

One A Day Essential High Potency Multivitamins are "complete with 100% U.S. RDA of 11 essential vitamins you need to feel your best," says the company's Web site. But where are the essential minerals you need to feel your best? One A Day Women's High Potency Multivitamin/Multimineral has the same vitamins as the Essential, plus just three minerals (calcium, iron, and zinc). In contrast, One A Day Men's, 50 Plus, and Maximum have at least eight.

It's not just One A Day. AARP, NatureMade, YourLife, and many others sell vitamins-only or vitamins-plus-a-few-minerals. There's no reason why you'd be more likely to run short on vitamins than minerals. A complete set of minerals is one feature that separates the best multis from the so-so ones. Look for chromium, copper, magnesium, zinc, and (for children and premenopausal women) iron.

2 No Daily Values

Almost all supplement labels now list %DVs, or Daily Values, to tell you how much of a day's worth of each vitamin or mineral you're getting. (Some labels still call them USRDAs, or U.S. Recommended Daily Allowances.) But there are exceptions. The Vitamin Shoppe One Daily with Iron and Country Life Chewable Adult's Multi have no DVs. Some Web sites--CVS and Solgar, for example--don't disclose DVs either. Without them, you're lost.

For example, how many people would realize that the five milligrams of potassium in Twinlab Daily One Caps with Iron is only one-tenth of one percent of the DV? Unless you've memorized the Daily Values of more than a dozen nutrients, you need those DVs.

3 Bumped Up Bs

Solgar Formula VM-75 supplies 75 mg each of vitamins B-1 (thiamin), B-2 (riboflavin), B-6, and niacin (sometimes called B-3). Nature Made Mega 2000 has 50 mg of each.

There's no reason why you would need such large--and equal--amounts of those nutrients. The Daily Values (1.5 mg for B-1, 1.7 mg for B-2, 20 mg for niacin, and 2 mg for B-6) aren't identical. Companies often jack up the B-vitamins to a round but irrelevant number because it's cheap and relatively safe. Translation: a clever marketing tool.

4 The Kitchen Sink

Some companies throw in everything but the kitchen sink to make their products look better. It doesn't matter that some of those ingredients are worthless, at least according to current research. For example, there is little evidence that the ginseng, alfalfa, cayenne, RNA, coenzyme Q-10, and bee pollen in some supplements do much of anything.

5 Just for Show

A variation on the "kitchen sink" gambit is to add ingredients in such minuscule quantities that they're worthless. For instance, KAL adds 10 mg each of dehydrated broccoli, spinach, bell pepper, and parsley (among a long list of other ingredients) to its Enhanced Energy-S. Add back the water and that still works out to no more than a thimbleful of all four vegetables combined.

GNC Men's Live Well has 50 mg of oat bran powder. You'd need more than 10,000 mg a day to lower your cholesterol significantly. Country Life Chewable Adult's Multi has 5 mg of ginkgo biloba. Studies on Alzheimer's patients typically use at least 120 mg a day.

There are no DVs for herbs, carotenoids, flavonoids, isoflavones, and other phytochemicals. Supplement makers know that while many consumers check to see if an ingredient is listed, they have no idea if the quantity is enough to matter.

6 Unit Switch

If you want to impress someone from another country, tell them your salary in pennies. That's the strategy vitamin makers sometimes use to make it look like they're adding lots of something. Instead of listing the amount of some nutrient in milligrams (mg), they list it in micrograms (mcg). Since there are 1,000 micrograms in one milligram, an amount expressed in micrograms looks a thousand times larger than the same amount expressed in milligrams.

For example, Solgar Ciplex, Naturvite, and Solovite tablets have 180 mcg of zinc. That's 0.18 mg ... just one percent of the DV. Schiff Double Day has 14 mcg of copper. That's less than one percent of the DV. And Solovite has 388 mcg of magnesium. That's one-tenth of one percent of the DV.