What Vitamins Should I Actually Take? An Honest Guide for the Rest of Us

Sooner or later every thoughtful person stands in front of a wall of supplements — a gleaming municipality of bottles, each promising to make you younger, calmer, and more magnetic to strangers — and asks the only sensible question in the building: what vitamins should I actually take? Not what the label implies I should take. Not what the man in the podcast, who is himself a bottle of supplements wearing a linen shirt, insists I take. What do I, a specific person with a specific body and a finite amount of money, genuinely need?

I have spent a good deal of my life among growing things, and I can tell you that the honest answer is the one nobody sells on a billboard: most reasonably well-fed people need remarkably few. A vitamin is not a personality. It is a small chemical the body cannot manufacture in sufficient quantity and must therefore be handed, like a farmhand who can do everything except sharpen his own scythe. If the food you eat is already handing it over, buying it again in capsule form is simply paying twice for a favour already done.

So let us walk the aisle together, slowly, and separate the few that earn their place from the many that are merely keeping expensive company in your cabinet.

The short honest list

If you take nothing else from this dispatch, take this: for a great many people, a sensible short list is vitamin D, possibly B12, and possibly magnesium — and even those depend entirely on who you are and how you live. Everything past that list should have to justify its existence, and most of it cannot.

Vitamin D — the one with a real case

Vitamin D is the closest thing the aisle has to an honest citizen, and the reason is almost poetic: your skin makes it from sunlight, and a great number of us have arranged our lives to avoid sunlight with the dedication of a monk. If you live somewhere with long grey winters, spend your daylight hours indoors, cover up for cultural or sensible sun-safety reasons, or simply have darker skin (which makes less of it at the same latitude), your body may not be getting the raw material it needs to support normal bones, muscles, and immune function.

This is the rare case where a modest daily supplement is a reasonable, unglamorous insurance policy for a lot of ordinary people. It supports the maintenance of normal bones and teeth and normal muscle function — plain structural housekeeping, not a miracle. If you want certainty rather than a guess, a doctor can measure your level with a simple blood test and tell you exactly where you stand instead of leaving you to divine it from the weather.

Vitamin B12 — for the plant-based and the older among us

B12 is a curious little vitamin because it comes, in any reliable quantity, almost entirely from animal foods — meat, fish, eggs, dairy. This produces two groups of people who genuinely ought to pay attention.

• If you eat a vegan or largely plant-based diet, you are not getting meaningful B12 from your food, full stop. A supplement (or reliably fortified foods) is not optional fussiness here; it supports normal red blood cell formation and normal function of the nervous system, and there is no plant that will quietly do it for you.
• If you are older, the body's ability to absorb B12 from food tends to decline with age regardless of how virtuously you eat. This is one of the quiet, undramatic reasons an older person's doctor might suggest it.

For everyone else who happily eats meat, fish, and eggs — you are almost certainly awash in the stuff already, and another dose changes nothing except the weight of your wallet.

Iron — the one you must NOT guess at

Now we arrive at the vitamin — mineral, strictly — that I would ask you to read twice. Iron matters enormously; it supports normal oxygen transport around the body and the reduction of tiredness and fatigue, which is precisely why it gets flung at anyone who yawns.

But iron is not a thing to self-prescribe on a hunch. Here is the uncomfortable truth the tired-person marketing omits: your body has no easy way to get rid of excess iron, and taking it when you do not need it is not merely wasteful — it can cause real harm. Being tired is not proof you are low in iron. Tiredness has a hundred fathers.

Iron is the one aisle where the correct first step is not the shelf but the doctor. Get tested. If a blood test shows you are genuinely low, a doctor will tell you how much to take and for how long. If it does not, put the bottle down.

This matters especially for people who menstruate (who lose iron regularly and are more likely to run low) — but even then, the sequence is test, then treat under guidance, never the reverse. Please do not let a stranger on the internet, this one very much included, talk you into a mineral your blood has not asked for.

Folate and pregnancy — a doctor's conversation, not a shelf decision

If you are pregnant or trying to become pregnant, folate (folic acid) belongs in an entirely separate category from everything else on this page, because the timing and the dose genuinely matter for early development. This is not a browse-and-choose decision. It is a short, specific conversation to have with a doctor or midwife, who will tell you exactly what to take and when. I mention it here only so you know to raise it — not so you can settle it in an aisle. Anyone carrying a pregnancy deserves proper guidance, not a guess dressed up as one.

Magnesium — genuinely useful for some, oversold to all

Magnesium has enjoyed a spectacular few years, promoted as the answer to sleep, stress, cramp, mood, and possibly the national mood. Strip away the theatre and something real remains: magnesium supports normal muscle function, normal nervous-system function, and the reduction of tiredness and fatigue. Some people — those eating few whole grains, nuts, legumes, and leafy greens — really may run short, and for them a modest supplement can be a sensible, boring win.

But if your plate already features those foods with any regularity, you are likely fine, and no amount of pastel packaging changes that. Useful for some; a placebo with good marketing for the well-fed many. Know which you are before you buy.

The great glittering middle that most people can skip

Which brings us to the largest section of the aisle: the multivitamins, the vitamin C towers, the alphabet of single letters, the greens powders that taste of a lawn's ambition. For a person eating a broadly varied diet — some vegetables, some fruit, some protein, some whole grains — most of these are solving a problem you do not have. Your body cannot bank most of the water-soluble ones; the surplus simply departs, making your mornings the most nutritious in the plumbing.

None of this is a rule for you specifically, and that is rather the point. Some people have real, diagnosed deficiencies, absorption conditions, restricted diets, or life stages that change the whole calculation — and for them, several of these become genuinely worthwhile. The only reliable way to know which camp you sit in is not a quiz on a bottle. It is food you can actually look at, and, where it matters, a doctor who can actually test you.

A small, sane way to decide

• Start with the plate, not the shelf. Fix the diet first; supplements are for genuine gaps, not for absolving a poor one.
• Match the vitamin to your actual life. Little sun, plant-based, older, pregnant, restricted diet — these are the real reasons to add something specific, not a vague wish to optimise.
• Test before you treat the ones that bite. Iron above all, and anything in pregnancy — see a doctor, get the number, follow the guidance.
• Buy less than the aisle wants you to. A short, deliberate list beats a shelf of hopeful bottles every single time.

That is the entire honest guide. Not thrilling. Not for sale on a billboard. But a good deal cheaper than the alternative, and considerably kinder to both your body and your wallet — which, in the end, are the two things you were trying to look after all along.

And if you would like the honest short list turned into something you can actually hold — sorted by who you are, what your diet leaves out, and what is genuinely worth the shelf space — the good people at NutriPeak have assembled The No-BS Supplement Guide, which is precisely the plain, organised next step this dispatch keeps gesturing at. Payable by card or crypto, entirely optional, and refreshingly free of the linen-shirted enthusiasm we have spent all afternoon avoiding.