Do Vitamins Really Improve Health?

Almost one in three people in the UK take a vitamin supplement every day, according to the Food Standards Authority, while 15 per cent of us turn to high-dose supplements for a quick fix. In the United States, 40 – 50% of the men and women 50 years of age or older regularly use multivitamin/mineral (MVM) supplements, making the annual sales of these supplements over $11 billion.

Vitamin supplements are everywhere, touting that a normal food diet doesn’t provide the entire nutrition we need. Supplementing with vitamins will make us healthier and will prolong our lives. But is this actually true? And could we be doing more harm than good by swallowing all these extracts each day?