In 2013, a group of five physicians from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and Warwick Medical School in the U.K. made a bold statement:
“We believe that the case is closed—supplementing the diet of well-nourished adults with (most) mineral or vitamin supplements has no clear benefit and might even be harmful. These vitamins should not be used for chronic disease prevention. Enough is enough,” they wrote in an emphatic editorial in Annals of Internal Medicine, one of the most popular medical journals in the US.
Their declaration was based on decades of large-scale studies that found no evidence multivitamins reduced the risk of heart disease or cancer, prevented memory decline, or lowered heart attack rates.
In science, however, the case is almost never truly closed.
This year, a randomized controlled study of more than 3,500 people over the the age of 60 who took multivitamins every day for three years found they performed better on memory tests after a year. After three years, the multivitamin group showed none of the age-related memory decline evidenced by the placebo group.
Does this mean the…
