No heart disease benefits from taking multivitamins Taking a daily multivitamin won't make any difference to your risk of heart problems, according to the results of a large good-quality trial in older men. What do we know already? Lots of people take multivitamins, pills, or other remedies that seem to provide a convenient way to get most of the daily recommended amounts of the vitamins the body needs to stay healthy. Some studies have followed people over time to see if there is a link between taking multivitamins and being less likely to have health problems, such as heart attacks and strokes, or to die from these kinds of heart problems. But these studies haven't always been good quality and have yielded conflicting results. This study, researchers say, is the first good-quality study to look at the link between taking multivitamins and preventing heart disease. This study looked at a group of 16,461 men in the US who, as part of an ongoing study of the long-term effects of taking multivitamins, were randomly split into two groups. One group took a multivitamin every day, and the other group took a dummy pill. After an average of 11 years, the researchers recorded how many men had heart attacks or strokes, or died of either a heart attack or a stroke. The researchers then compared whether there was any difference between the two groups. What does the new study say? Men taking a multivitamin did not have fewer heart attacks or strokes,