Are vitamin supplements helpful?
Robert Butler: Of course you should maintain your basic daily vitamin requirements. But you shouldn’t get carried away either. Vitamin E was under study by the National Institute on Aging in the hopes that it would prove to be very valuable with Alzheimer’s disease. But it was not. So I think, like so many things in nature, it’s a matter of amount, what might be called proportionality, or just plain wisdom. People used to think if a multivitamin was good for them, then more of it would be even better, but that’s just not true, unfortunately. Most vitamin requirements are best achieved by eating six to nine servings of fruits and vegetables a day. Very few people do that, so probably the cheapest, least expensive multivitamin you can buy is not a bad idea to help achieve them. If you’re an older man, you should not have a supplement with iron because iron accumulates in the heart and can lead to a condition called hemosiderosis. Look on the market for vitamin supplements that do not hav
