The conventional wisdom in the medical community has long been that multivitamins are useless.
For years, study after study found no benefits from popping a multivitamin a day.
Professor Adam Brickman, who studies the aging brain at Columbia University, told Insider he hadn't popped a multivitamin since he was a kid when he started his most recent study of multivitamins for memory loss, roughly six years ago.
"I'm just as skeptical as anyone else when it comes to this stuff," Brickman said.
But a number of new and emerging studies — including his own — are starting to suggest the truth about multivitamins is complicated.
Brickman is the author of a large, rigorous study published earlier this year that showed men over the age of 60 and women over 65 who took a daily multivitamin (in this case, it was Centrum) were able to consistently perform better on common memory tests than those who took a placebo. A study from September 2022, using different memory tests, had similar results.
"When we start seeing that kind of consistency across well-designed studies, it certainly helps convince me — the ultimate skeptic — that we're on to something real," he said.
These new finds suggest aging brains may derive some small but real memory perks from popping a multivitamin a day. As a result, Brickman has started incorporating a multivitamin into his daily routine.
"I started taking multivitamins the day we ran the analyses and saw the results, and I take 'em every morning," he said.
Older adults may benefit more from vitamins than young people
The memory impact of multivitamins in these new studies was mild. Taking a multivitamin improved older adults' scores on memory tests versus placebo, but only marginally.
The multivitamin wasn't a silver bullet, either. Multivitamins didn't eradicate Alzheimer's or treat cognitive diseases. Rather, taking a vitamin seemed to help a little with some of the regular, subtle declines in memory that accompany normal cognitive aging.
Brickman said it looked as if the multivitamin was "rescuing three years" of cognitive aging compared with a placebo pill. That's not significant enough that people would notice the difference.
"You might not take a multivitamin and say, 'Wow, my memory is so much clearer,'" he said. But for Brickman, a scientist crunching data, the benefit was stunning enough to influence his own choices at home.
"The people taking the multivitamin, their memory was higher at every subsequent visit compared with the people on placebo," he said.
These positive findings on multivitamins are similar to other research showing older adults could also benefit from supplementing important nutrients such as protein and vitamin D into their regimens.
Scientists suspect part of the reason older adults may benefit more from taking a multivitamin than younger people is that we become less efficient at extracting key nutrients from our food as we age.
"There's probably something to do with absorption," Brickman said.
Nutrient-rich food is still the best way for everyone to get their vitamins
Eating fresh produce such as vegetables, whole grains, and beans is still the most efficient, straightforward, and safest science-backed way to get your vitamins.
"We're not suggesting that people should get their vitamin and nutrient intake from supplements — the primary source of that should be from whole and healthy foods," Brickman said.
Still, this growing body of research on the benefits of multivitamins supports the idea that it can't hurt for older adults to take them if they want to.
"I think that multivitamins, along with a lot of other things that we could potentially do as we age, might have a modest but meaningful effect on how we age, cognitively," Brickman said.
