The October issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association had the results of a very large prospective randomized placebo-controlled study on the effects of multi-vitamins on men. The study was part of the the Physician's Health Study II, that included 14,641 male US physicians who were 50 years or older when the study began. The multi-vitamin that was used was Centrum Silver. At least they were all using the same multi-vitamin and were not relying on people simple stating in a questionnaire that they use a multi-vitamin. Centrum Silver is not the cadillac of multi-vitamins, so it would be interesting to see a comparison with a better multi-vitamin. But we know that's expensive and not likely to happen! The upshot of this aspect of the study was that those taking the multi-vitamin were less likely to get cancer. After 11 years there was an 8% reduction in total cancer. Prostate cancer was not affected at all, so if that is pulled out, there was a 12% reduction in cancer overall. Since this study was done on physicians who should know how to eat a good diet, the effect could be even stronger on groups of people who don't eat as well.
Previous studies have shown mixed results with multi-vitamins. It is always important to know how the study was conducted to know if the results are at all meaningful.
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