For today’s busy individuals who struggle to maintain a balanced diet, multivitamins have become an essential nutritional solution. With countless options flooding the market, the new gold standard for choosing a multivitamin isn’t just about ingredients—it’s about how extensively the product has been researched and for how long.
Industry reports from Tuesday reveal that a recent comprehensive analysis of major studies has uncovered significant differences in the depth of research among multivitamin brands.
Standing out from the pack is the global multivitamin powerhouse Centrum. This brand has been a key player in numerous clinical studies since its launch in 1978, which was based on Dr. Ellenbogen’s groundbreaking nutritional research. Centrum’s commitment to science is evident in its participation in long-term clinical trials, including the landmark Linxian Nutrition Intervention Trial that kicked off in 1985.
This groundbreaking study, conducted over four and a half years, was a collaborative effort between the U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences Cancer Institute. It tracked the health impacts of vitamin and mineral supplementation on 29,584 nutritionally deficient residents in China’s Linxian region.
The results were eye-opening: participants who took a combination of beta-carotene, vitamin E, and selenium showed significantly lower overall mortality rates and a marked decrease in stomach cancer deaths. This research is hailed as a rare, large-scale randomized clinical trial that convincingly demonstrated the positive effects of nutritional supplementation on cancer-related outcomes.
Multivitamin Users Show Brain Age 5 Years Younger
Another game-changing study, the Physicians Health Study II (PHS II), conducted by the National Institutes of Health from 1997 to 2011, examined the link between multivitamin intake and cancer risk. This extensive research involved 14,641 healthy middle-aged and older male physicians.
The findings were striking: the group taking Centrum experienced a statistically significant reduction in overall cancer risk, particularly for cancers other than prostate cancer.
But the benefits of multivitamins don’t stop at cancer prevention. Recent research has delved into their effects on cognitive function. The COSMOS study, a collaborative effort by Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and the NIH, tracked the impact of multivitamin-mineral (MVM) supplementation over two years in 5,203 adults aged 60 and older.
The results, published in the Journal of Clinical Nutrition in 2024, were nothing short of amazing. The multivitamin group showed a brain age that was, on average, 4.8 years younger than the placebo group when it came to ‘episodic memory’—the ability to recall everyday events in context.
This is particularly significant because episodic memory is often the first cognitive function to decline with age and in early dementia. Moreover, a meta-analysis combining three cognitive function studies—including phone and web-based tests and in-person assessments—reported promising trends in overall memory and cognitive function improvement.
Centrum: The Multivitamin Backed by Decades of Data
Centrum’s scientific credibility extends even to outer space. The brand was included in the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) rigorous experiments on vitamin stability in space environments. These tests evaluated whether key nutrients, like B vitamins, could withstand the extreme conditions of microgravity, radiation, and long-term storage following actual space flights.
Out of two commercial multivitamins tested, only Centrum passed NASA’s stringent stability tests. This achievement underscores that Centrum isn’t just about nutrient composition—it’s about maintaining ingredient stability and consistent quality even under the most challenging conditions.
A comprehensive literature review of global multivitamin brands revealed that Centrum has been featured in an impressive 32 clinical studies—the highest number recorded from March 2020 to March 2024.
To put this research legacy into perspective, it’s equivalent to about 187,000 people taking Centrum for an entire year. This extensive body of evidence demonstrates that Centrum isn’t based on short-term experiments but on decades of rigorous, long-term observational data.
