Why Single-Ingredient Supplements Beat Multivitamins

Pick up any multivitamin and flip it over. You’ll see a list of 30 to 50 ingredients, each with a percentage of your “daily value.” It looks thorough. It looks like you’re covered. You’re probably not.

The dosing problem

Multivitamins have a size constraint. You can only fit so much into a pill or capsule that a person can actually swallow. When you’re trying to pack 40+ ingredients into that space, something has to give — and it’s usually dosing.

Take magnesium. The recommended daily intake is 310-420mg depending on age and sex. Most multivitamins contain 50-100mg. That’s not a therapeutic dose. That’s a marketing checkbox.

B12 is similar. You’ll see it listed on the label, but at doses that barely move the needle if you’re actually deficient — and certainly not in forms optimized for absorption.

The absorption problem

Some nutrients compete with each other for absorption. Calcium and iron are the classic example — take them together and your body absorbs less of both. Zinc and copper interfere with each other. Iron and magnesium compete for the same transporters.

When everything is crammed into the same pill, these interactions happen every single time you take it. A single-ingredient supplement eliminates that problem entirely.

The form problem

This is the big one. There are cheap forms and there are effective forms of almost every nutrient. Multivitamin manufacturers have every incentive to use the cheapest form available — it keeps their margins high and their ingredient list long.

• Magnesium oxide (cheap, ~4% absorption) vs. magnesium glycinate (high absorption, gentle on stomach)
• Cyanocobalamin (synthetic B12, requires conversion) vs. methylcobalamin (active form, ready to use)
• Folic acid (synthetic) vs. methylfolate (bioavailable, especially important for the ~40% of people with MTHFR variants)

When you buy a single-ingredient supplement from a practitioner-grade brand, you get the right form at the right dose. When you buy a multivitamin, you get a little bit of the cheap form of everything.

When a multivitamin makes sense

They’re not useless. If you eat a reasonably balanced diet and just want basic insurance, a decent multivitamin is fine. No harm done.

But if you have a specific deficiency, you’re on medication that affects absorption (like a GLP-1), or you have particular health goals — a targeted single-ingredient approach will do more for you than any multivitamin on the shelf.

The bottom line

You don’t need 47 ingredients. You need the right 2 or 3, in forms your body can actually use, at doses that actually matter. That’s the whole idea behind what we’re building.