Most multivitamins are useless because they generally contain suboptimal forms, doses, and ratios. If you want to see good effects, consider individual vitamins in appropriate forms and doses.
The barrier to entry is far too high for most people. A safe, minimal dosage that will help in cases of severe deficiency can be had with an inexpensive pill and negligible time investment.
Regular blood tests and dosing is expensive in mental effort, time, and money.
A regular blood test is mainly needed just for vitamin A, vitamin D, and sometimes for vitamin B6. The rest won't silently cause critical issues if somewhat exceeded.
As for minerals, it is possible to manage the dose without a need for testing.
For B6, it's safer to supplement only the P5P form, as it's much less likely to cause any serious or lasting issue. I would limit intake of P5P to a max of 40 mg per day. If you do this, and you don't have any resulting neuropathy problems (you shouldn't), then you don't need to test it.
In contrast, the inactive cheaper form of B6 which is pyridoxine is more likely to result in problems if taken at above 30 mg/day in the long term.
I very much appreciate your advice. How would I recognize the different forms of B6 in the bottle? Would you say that a multivitamin from a well-respected company, like Centrum, would be a good choice? I'm trying to lower barriers here, for myself and my family.
Centrum is a start, but it is not great for dozens of reasons. It would contain B6, the pyridoxine form, not the P5P form, and not in a dose that's sufficient for stress reduction. I take all individual vitamins and individual minerals.
Going through your posts I see quite a few terms to google and learn about. I appreciate your advice, and for kickstarting a health improvement in my life that I've been meaning to do for years.
It’s one of the reasons that regulation would help a lot here. One simple example is chelation. Your body absorbs magnesium when it’s chelated at a rate many multiple times higher than what you might typically get from an OTC multivitamin.
So a multivitamin might contain some magnesium, but what it doesn’t tell you on the label is that the form of magnesium they give you is not going to be absorbed at all and just pass right through your body. Most people need some other formulation of magnesium to actually be absorbed. I would go so far as to say that a fair amount of what goes into a lot of multivitamins on the label is borderline fraud because of stuff like this
