Multivitamin complexes often promise to boost energy and immunity, combat stress, and sometimes even improve cardiovascular health. And for many, it is customary to take a multivitamin to boost one’s physical and mental health, even before enjoying one’s morning cup of coffee.

But how effective are these capsules and tablets, particularly in terms of life expectancy? Research led by the National Cancer Institute in the United States has looked into this, analysing data from 390,124 healthy American adults, followed for over two decades.

The aim was to investigate the association between regular multivitamin consumption over a long period of time and overall mortality, as well as death from cardiovascular disease and cancer.

Published in the journal Jama Network Open, this research suggests that, for healthy adults, daily multivitamin intake had no impact on the risk of death from all causes. In other words, these supplements won’t make you live longer.

This also applied to the risk of death from cancer and cardiovascular disease.

With respect to their findings, the researchers explained that they chose a large sample of participants to mitigate the effects of certain biases that could have altered the results of this research.

“Because the study population was so large and included lengthy follow-up and extensive information on demographics and lifestyle factors, the researchers were able to mitigate the effects of possible biases that may have influenced the findings of other studies.

“For example, people who use multivitamins may have healthier lifestyles in general, and sicker patients may be more likely to increase their use of multivitamins,” a news release accompanying the study outlined.

Moving forward, the researchers intend to further examine their work to evaluate this association in more specific populations – notably those likely to have nutritional deficiencies – or to analyse the influence of multivitamins on other aspects of health.