The vitamin boom: Do supplements really work?
14 minutes to read
By: Donna Chisholm
New Zealanders increasingly turn to supplements for protection against everything from colds to Covid. But do our laws deny us access to products that may actually help us? Donna Chisholm reports. Nowhere are New Zealanders conflicted attitudes to vitamin supplements better illustrated than in the Dunedin home of Dr Lisa Houghton, a professor of nutrition at the University of Otago, and her accountant husband Brett Dailey.
Ask Houghton whether it s a good idea to take multivitamins and she ll tell you the people who need them least are those who take them most; that we get the critical nutrients we need from our food. Apart from taking iron when she was younger, she doesn t use them. Then she laughs and adds, But my husband loves them. Dailey, she says, has given each of their three daughters, now in their teens and early twenties, a multivitamin tablet each day since they w