What Makes a Good Multivitamin? Designed for people whose diets
don’t meet all their nutritional needs, multiple vitamin–mineral
supplements (“multivitamins”) are convenient nutrient
combinations, usually taken one to six times per day. While it’s
generally agreed that a healthy diet is the best foundation for
health, everyday life makes that goal challenging for many
people. So, some people supplement in hope of preventing
disease-causing deficiencies and providing higher nutrient
amounts than they can get through diet alone, which may help
prevent or manage certain diseases. Who decides how much is
enough? In the US, official Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA)
recommendations were developed by a government-appointed panel
in the 1940s to broadly cover healthy people of any age or
gender. Used to design mass food programs, such as for the armed
forces and food relief/ration programs, RDA’s were the basis for
the Reference Daily Intake (RDI) values, which the US Food and
Drug Administration (FDA) uses to cre