There are too many multivitamins on the market today to properly keep track of, but that means that it can also be easy to get bamboozled.
Some multivitamins are sorely lacking in some essential nutrients, while others may pack more than your required serving or focus their attention on chemicals that aren’t going to be all that effective. If you’re shopping for a new multivitamin, these are the things you should look out for.
For Your Bone Health
Drinking milk isn’t as common as it used to be—but that shift away from a milk-heavy diet has had an impact on our bone health and increased the risk of osteoporosis.
Nearly half of Americans don’t consume enough calcium, so tooth and bone care should be a cornerstone of your multivitamin regimen. That’s especially true for women since they tend to start shedding bone density earlier than men.
Calcium should obviously play a role in the chemical makeup of your multivitamin, but it isn’t the only inclusion that can improve your overall bone health. Look out for vitamin D as well. Having a reserve of vitamin D is a necessity if you want your body to properly process the calcium that you absorb.
While you can get the appropriate vitamin D intake by just spending 15 minutes in direct sunlight a day, roughly 40% of Americans suffer from a vitamin D deficiency.
For Your Immune System
Most humans don’t absorb a lot of zinc as a part of their average diet, but it’s one of the most crucial minerals for our continued well-being.
As more and more non-organic meats enter the market, zinc consumption is becoming even lower in the modern diet, and we think it’s one of the most critical inclusions you look for in a multivitamin.
That’s because while zinc may not serve a front and center role in our body, it does serve as one of the most important supplements for maintaining the health of your immune system. But zinc doesn’t just help us battle a cold before it becomes a serious issue. It also serves as a helper during the process of breaking down fat, protein, and carbohydrates and transforming them into energy for our body.
For Your Daily Energy
Zinc serves a secondary role in helping our bodies produce energy, but the real stars of the show are the eight B vitamins that play a major role in human nutrition. B vitamins all work together to break down nutrients and keep your body up and active, but each one also performs its own specialized role.
B-12 is the B vitamin you should especially look out for. It helps produce DNA and maintains the health of both blood and nerve cells. And while it plays a critical role, a B-12 deficiency is relatively common.
Vegetarians and vegans are especially prone to suffering from a B-12 deficiency, as the vitamin is most often found in meat, seafood, and eggs. Your daily B-12 demands aren’t especially high, but if you rarely if ever eat meat, you’ll definitely want to supplement your B-12 intake.
Whole Food vs. Synthetic Multivitamins
Most multivitamins are made in a lab, and the actual vitamins in nutrients are chemical doppelgangers that do their best job to mimic the role of organic vitamins and minerals. Synthetics have their advantages. They’re cheap to produce and have a shelf life that’s practically limitless, but they’re far less efficient than vitamins from natural sources.
Whole food vitamins, by contrast, have a shorter shelf life and usually come with a higher price tag, but they have much higher absorption rates and also include trace minerals that help with the process of digesting nutrients.
Not only can you be confident that you’ll get your daily intake, but you can also be confident that there won’t be undigested minerals left behind. We think quality is just as important as specificity when shopping for a natural multivitamin for men.