November 2026
With so many supplements on the market, it seems like you can meet all of your vitamin and mineral needs with a pill. But when it comes to hitting the U.S. RDA for vitamins and minerals, are supplements really as good as food?
The short answer: No. Supplements can be helpful if you are trying to remedy a nutrient deficiency, your diet is a little short on key vitamins and minerals, you have a malabsorption disorder (like celiac or Crohn’s disease), or you’re taking certain medications that are known to deplete nutrients.
Beyond that, you should aim to get most or all of the vitamins and minerals you need from the food you eat. Here’s why:
- Food contains important cofactors that supplements don’t. A cofactor is a helper compound that lets your body absorb or use a nutrient — for example, the vitamin C in an orange boosts iron absorption from plant foods.
- It’s very hard to overdose on food. But you can easily overdose on vitamins and minerals — especially fat-soluble vitamins (which aren’t excreted in the urine) and certain minerals like iron. Trace minerals like selenium and zinc are also risky because the body needs so little of them.
- People who get their vitamins and minerals from food have better outcomes. A study of more than 30,000 U.S. adults found that supplement users didn’t have lower death rates than people who got their nutrients from food — and it linked excess supplemental calcium to a higher risk of cancer death.
