MULTIVITAMINS AND CHOICES

I have a pretty good diet and eat a variety of food across the various food groups.  Each morning I take a multivitamin along with a few other nutritional supplements.  I prefer taking one multivitamin a day instead of some varieties being taken with each meal.

As I am finishing up the latest bottle - One A Day for women by Bayer which I am sure I bought at Costco as it has 300 tablets, I was wondering what I should choose next.  Are all vitamin formulas pretty much equal and what about the quality of the ingredients.  How can I judge if the quality is different between the various companies?

Usually when I am standing and gazing at the shelves with the various vitamin brands, I will have two or more bottles in my hands and start to compare the dosage of each of the vitamins from the different bottles.  Of course I can't remember from the literature I have collected on what dosage I should be aiming for from each of the various vitamins and minerals.  That vital piece of information would be at home somewhere, neatly filed away and never to be found again.

Instead of perusing the vitamin shelves at Costco or another pharmacy,  I stopped in at one of the health food stores I frequent.  I started to peruse the aisle where multivitamins are sold.  Besides just looking at the vitamins, there are also minerals to consider as part of the multivitamin partnership.  The One A DAY multivitamin that I have been taking contains calcium, iron and magnesium.  There are multivitamins which contain many more minerals than just these three.  I started to ask the sales clerk questions about the various varieties and companies.  I was interested to know who makes a better product.  She recommended The Ultimate One for women by Nu-Life.  I have used Nu-Life products before but couldn't remember which ones.  This product contains 13 minerals and 14 vitamins.  The One A DAY product contains 12 vitamins.

When I compare prices, the One A Day is probably less than 10 cents a day and the Ultimate One is around 30 cents a say.  Are the vitamins and minerals any better in the more expensive product?  The dosage is not quite the same between the two products.  I decided to buy the product made by Nu-life and to give it a try.  I won't be able to figure out quality of the ingredients without doing more research and reading further on this topic.