Multivitamins and your health

An increasing number of Britons are turning to multivitamin supplements in order to get a quick fix of the daily nutrients we need. According to the Food Standards Authority, one in three UK residents take a daily vitamin supplement. In 2009 alone, we spent £139 million on multivitamin pills.

These supplements promise to deliver vitamins that are crucial for all sorts of bodily functions, such as vitamin A for maintaining eyesight and vitamin C for building immunity. Many nutritionists argue that these essential vitamins are being squeezed out of our diets by our increasingly high-speed lifestyles. They argue that, in an ideal world, we should be able to get all the vitamins we need from a balanced diet, but Amelia Freer, of Freer Nutrition, says “reality falls far short of this”.

Intensive agricultural techniques and a reliance on processed foods and ready meals have left our food with far fewer vitamins and minerals than before. High levels of stress also contribute to a reduction in the vitamins our bodies have at their disposal, with Amelia Freer adding that “cortisol, the hormone released with stress, uses up B-vitamins and vitamin C and in the long term can burn you out while draining your body of vitamins”.

That the vitamins we need are becoming increasingly harder to obtain through the food we eat is an overriding theme of those championing multivitamin supplements, with these supplements providing the obvious choice to make up for the shortfall. However, the efficacy of vitamin supplements in maintaining and improving our health is coming under increasing scrutiny.

Research conducted in America, which followed 14,500 men for more than a decade, found that daily multivitamin use did nothing to cut the risk of a heart attack or a stroke, with one of the researchers, Howard Sesso of Harvard Medical School, concluding that “there is no substitute for a heart-healthy diet and exercise”.

A similar study done in the UK returned corresponding results, with Catherine Collins, chief dietician at St. George’s Hospital in London, saying that the “worried well” are “wasting their money”.

These doubts have not stopped Boost Buddy, a new multivitamin company offering users a “personal touch”, which visited Warwick University in week 4 of term three. Representatives of Boost Buddy visited the Piazza to market the product and hand out free packs of the multivitamin tablets to students. A large tent, complete with a bloodhound mascot, was set up to attract the attention of students passing by.

Boost Buddy aims to provide students with “the first truly personalised multivitamin range specially formulated for young adults and their busy, buzzy lifestyles”. There are currently 12 varieties of multivitamin tablets available through the Boost Buddy website, www.boostbuddy.com. These include ‘Calm’, which “may help contribute to the normal functioning of the nervous system”, and ‘Pep’, which is designed with students who “fancy a kick start” in mind.

The multivitamins can be purchased as part of three distinct packs of 28 vitamins, at £7 each. These are the ‘Study Pack’, to help with exam preparation, the ‘Heart & Soul Pack’, designed to help maintain long-term health, and the ‘Hunting Pack’, to “help you win at the mating game”. Students can also mix and match four of the 12 vitamins into their own personal pack, “allowing young adults to build a personal multivitamin combination”.

Students at Warwick were treated to free packs containing 28 individual multivitamins. The varieties on offer in those packs were ‘Grow’, ‘Pep’, ‘Immunity’ and ‘Calm’.

First-year English Literature student Annmarie McQueen took one of each of the pills on offer, and commented that: “In the beginning I was a little bit wary about taking them. In particular I felt the effects of the Pep pill, which definitely gave me energy and stopped me from feeling tired and lethargic. Each pill comes with a little leaflet explaining what it does and overall I think it is a really clever idea.”

Some students, however, were less than convinced with the properties of the tablets. First-year Economics student Kenji Kinoshita said: “I think it’s a placebo effect, they are about as effective as you want them to be.”