YES. Everybody should take a multivitamin. A bold statement perhaps and there’s no shortage of doctors and nutritionists who will tell you otherwise. They’re wrong. Speaking from personal experience, both with my own health and in helping others stay healthy, I can tell you taking a quality multivitamin every day is one of the best things you can do for yourself, aside from eating right, exercising and getting enough sleep.

When I was 13 years old, I contracted a bad case of mononucleosis; a case so severe my doctor thought at first it was something far more serious like leukemia. My case was so pronounced and so classic of mononucleosis, slides of my blood were used in the local medical college to illustrate the classic disease. Due to my battered immune system, my right eye was infected and my doctor wasn’t entirely sure it could be saved. Fortunately it was.

I was sent home with penicillin for my eye and told to do three things:

• Rest

• Eat as much healthy food as possible

• Take a multivitamin

Keep in mind my doctor was very conservative and this was 1970… not exactly the heyday of health and nutrition. But fortunately, my doctor had the good sense to see that I was likely deficient in something, perhaps some vitamin or trace nutrient and the simplest and most effective thing to do was to have me take a multivitamin.

Well, the regimen worked. In a couple of weeks I was back on my feet and my eye was completely healed. I feel certain this would not have been the case if I had not been prescribed those vitamins. Now I realize this is strictly anecdotal and not the conclusion of a multi million dollar study, but it is what it is and it was the event in my life that got me interested in dietary supplementation.

Now unlike the plethora of solid scientific research supporting the use of individual supplements for specific conditions (like lipoic acid for diabetes or bromelain for inflammation) there is a relative lack of research showing definitive results relating to multivitamins. The reason for this is the peculiar nature of scientific research. Science is by its very nature, reductionist. That is, the scientific method works best when a problem can be reduced to a single component and that component can then be tested against a hypothesis. Such as… does lipoic acid increase insulin sensitivity in Type 2 diabetics? Answer, “yes.”