A high quality diet is the cornerstone of good health. High quality diets contain all of the nutrients required for health, but are absent of toxins and processed foods that can cause metabolic disruption. While eating whole foods will go some way to providing optimal health it is clear from the nutritional literature that dietary supplements are needed in order to obtain total health. The exact supplements required will depend on the circumstances of the individual, but even the highest quality diets cannot provide all the nutrients in their required amounts consistently. For example, a number of studies have shown health benefit from both vitamin D and selenium supplementation, because food sources of these nutrients are limited and regular sunlight exposure is not always possible. Taking a high potency multinutrient supplement therefore makes sense as it provides a consistent intake of nutrients to bolster any deficiencies in the diet. This is particularly true for poorer communities that do not have access to a wide range of foods.
It has been shown that when poor people from rural communities are given multinutrient supplements their health improves. This likely reflect the presence of nutrient deficiencies caused by their limited dietary intakes. Such people generally eat healthy diets, low in animal foods, high in plant foods, and with little in the way of refined carbohydrates or sugars. However, supplementation with various nutrients improves their health and protects them from disease. For example, researchers1 have investigated the effects of a multinutrient supplement on children from the rural Shaanxi province of Northwest China. In the study, children were fed a multinutrient supplement containing 5 mg of iron in addition to 20 other vitamins and minerals, or a placebo. Before the study began, 43 % of the children were anaemic. After 5 months of the supplements, the haemoglobin concentrations in those children in the treatment group had risen by 1.7 g/L compared to the placebo group, and rates of anaemia had fallen by 7 %.
These results support data from other studies to show that large number of people benefit from multinutrient supplements. Almost 50 % of the children in this study were anaemic, possibly because they did not have access to red meat as a staple food. This deficiency would have put them at risk of impaired learning and reduced physical output and would have caused significant health problem. As well as significantly reducing the anaemia rates amongst the children, the multinutrient supplement also significantly reduced the anxiety levels amongst the children compared to the placebo. This suggests that nutrient deficiencies may be a cause of at least some cases of anxiety. The multinutrient supplement also likely improved the long term health of the children and reduced their risk of chronic diseases such as cancer. Studies administering selenium tablets in areas of rural China have for example decreased the cancer rates significantly (here). Multinutrient supplements therefore offer reasonable insurance against chronic disease caused by dietary deficiencies.
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