Your health: Are multivitamins good for you?

Are multivitamins good for you?

Everyone is so busy, it is difficult to put as much time as you'd like into a diet that ensures you get all the vitamins and minerals dietitians recommend in a day. For many women, the answer to this problem has traditionally been taking vitamin pills.

However, over the past five years multiple studies and health experts have come forward to reveal that vitamins are not the health boosters we hoped them to be, according to FabFitFun.com. In 2013, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force released a report that reviewed the data from 26 medical studies on vitamins. The task force concluded it could find no correlation between taking vitamins and better health.

It also found taking excess amounts of vitamins, such as beta carotene, could also be harmful. One exception is folic acid, which docs often recommend expectant moms to take to prevent neural tube defects in babies. Studies have supported folic acid's benefits for babies, so this is one.

First federal gluten-free regulations

Regulations that tell consumers just what it means when a product is labeled “gluten free” recently took effect and are a “major milestone,” says one of the leading experts on gluten disorders, the Los Angeles Times reports.

“The gluten-free diet for someone with celiac disease is like insulin for diabetics,” says Dr. Alessio Fasano, director of the Center for Celiac Research at Massachusetts General Hospital and author of the recent book “Gluten Freedom.”

The Food and Drug Administration has determined that, as of Aug. 5, packaged food labeled gluten free (or similar claims such as “free of gluten”) cannot contain more than 20 parts per million of gluten. One caveat is that use of the gluten-free label is voluntary; there is no requirement that a package containing gluten must declare that.

People who have the autoimmune disorder celiac disease can become very sick if they eat the tiniest amount of gluten, a protein found in wheat, barley and rye. There also are a range of other conditions set off by gluten.