Start here in your quest for optimal health
Your nutritional supplementation should begin with a solid baseline of high-quality multivitamins & minerals, especially trace elements like iodine, magnesium, zinc, selenium, copper, manganese, chromium, and molybdenum like this Vitacost product does. Your body needs these elements in only very small amounts, but they are vital to good health. Low-quality ‘multis’ which don’t provide such trace elements are no bargain, and they are often more expensive than these good ones!
In addition, this product from Vitacost includes a wide range of beneficial molecules such as antioxidants and polyphenols from herbal sources that science has found can be beneficial to health in a number of different ways.
However, one should not rely solely on one source of multivitamins and minerals for all their nutritional needs, but be smarter about it. In particular if you look at the ingredient list for this product you will see that it includes 200 International Units (IU) of Vitamin E, which is too much. It has not yet percolated down to the public consciousness or even the manufacturers of nutritional supplements that long-term doses of Vitamin E above 100 IU have been found to be associated with higher rates of certain cancers.
You also do not need 5,000 IU of Vitamin A day after day either from supplements either unless your doctor has reason to put you on such a regimen, as you will inevitably get a certain amount of that and most of the other nutrients in your diet. Nor do you need 8,333% of the recommended quantity of Vitamin B12 every day either, though it will not hurt you. The idea here is to ensure that you are getting at least some of almost everything you need, and not become deficient in any necessary nutrient. Toward that end I suggest that you only take two or three capsules daily instead of the six capsules recommended on this product’s label, and balance out the shortfall of certain other nutrients, particularly the B vitamins, with separate supplementation. Short-term exceptions would be in such cases where you’ve lacked a good diet or any supplementation for months or years, and/or you’re recovering from illness or surgery, where you might want to take the full six capsules daily for a few days or weeks to saturate your body with these nutrients, and then taper back to two or three capsules daily.