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Posted Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2010, at 12:31 PM ET Deciding what to eat for dinner can be mind-bending. How do we keep track of the ever-evolving recommendations for what to put on, and leave off, the plate? Red meat might cause cancer! But don't replace it with tofu—soy concoctions might be carcinogenic, too! Don't even try to figure out where carbs stand this week. And the verdict on coffee, chocolate, and alcohol changes faster than you can order a mocha martini.
Vitamins—with their promise to bridge the gap between the nutrients our bodies need and those they get—have always seemed reassuringly simple: Just pop a multivitamin and let your body soak in those extra nutrients. But not any longer. During the past few years, study after study has raised doubts about what, if any, good vitamins actually do a body. They could even pose some real medical risks.
Half of all American adults take some sort of nutritional supplement. But research on a wide variety of patient populations and medical conditions has failed to find much evidence that multivitamins, the most commonly used of the lot, prevent major chronic diseases in healthy people. The most recent knock came this spring, when a study of more than 160,000 post-menopausal women, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, found that the all-in-one pills did not prevent cancer, heart attacks, or strokes and did not reduce overall mortality.