Do you need to take dietary supplements? (October 2025)
By Carrie Dennett, MPH, RDN
The dietary supplement industry brings in billions of dollars each year. If you pop a daily multivitamin, take supplemental forms of single nutrients, or reach for specialized supplements targeted at a specific health concern or your stage of life, odds are its because you want to improve your health or prevent chronic disease. Is that a smart strategy, or are you wasting your money? And how do nutrients from supplements compare to nutrients in actual food?
For example, many people think it’s good “insurance” to take a multivitamin—even though there’s no evidence supporting use of multivitamins for people who are eating a healthy diet, and healthful eating can’t be reduced to isolated nutrients. It’s true that nutrition science used to focus on the role of specific nutrients in health and disease. But our understanding of the role of diet in health has moved well past the nutrient profile of the food or meal to the bigger picture of eating patterns and the food matrix.
The food matrix is the complex interactions between all of a food’s components—micronutrients (vitamins and minerals), macronutrients (carbohydrates, protein and fat) and other bioavailable compounds—as well as how those compounds are packaged and compartmentalized within the food. Another way to define “food matrix” is that it’s the idea that the same food component behaves differently when it is in an isolated form compared to when it’s present in a food, and even behaves differently in different foods.
When we get our nutrients from food, the synergy of all those compounds within the food’s matrix has additional (and not always quantifiable) benefits for our health and well-being, when compared with consuming those compounds after they’ve been isolated and packaged into a dietary supplement. Research on the food matrix effects on diet and health is evolving, but so far we do know that the health impacts of a food or diet are more than their composition of nutrients.
Does this mean no one should take dietary supplements? No. While, ironically, most dietary supplement users already eat a balanced, nutrient-rich diet, some people do benefit from supplementation.
For example, the U.S. Dietary Guidelines for Americans has noted serious shortfalls in calcium, vitamin D, fiber and potassium. Evidence also supports the value of prenatal vitamins and supplementation of specific nutrients for individuals who don’t absorb them well. Also, people who are on low-calorie diets, have a poor appetite, or avoid certain food groups are at risk of falling short on many essential nutrients, and a multivitamin/mineral can fill in the blanks. Other people may have specific nutrient needs that are difficult to meet even with a nutritious diet. For example:
· Women who are pregnant or might become pregnant and have increased need for folic acid.
· Adults over 50 who have difficulty absorbing vitamin B-12.
· Premenopausal women who struggle with iron-deficiency anemia.
· Individuals who don’t produce enough vitamin D from the sun.
In general, it’s a good idea to avoid taking single-nutrients supplements unless you have an identified need, because more of certain nutrients is not better. If you want to take a multivitamin, choose one tailored to your age, gender, and other characteristics, such as pregnancy. This can help you get the right amount of key nutrients, but keep in mind that most multivitamins don’t contain enough of nutrients we may need a lot of—including calcium, magnesium and vitamin D, and most don’t contain
choline. They also don’t contain beneficial food components like omega-3 fatty acids and phytonutrients. Again, that’s why, whenever possible, we should get our nutrients from food.
References and Resources:
Office of Dietary Supplements: https://ods.od.nih.gov/
Association of Multivitamin and Mineral Supplementation and Risk of Cardiovascular Disease: https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/circoutcomes.117.004224
Overview: the food matrix and its role in the diet: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10408398.2025.2453074#d1e129
Food Matrix and Macronutrient Digestion: https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-food-032519-051646
