Age-specific supplements guide

Which supplements are essential for your customers to take daily? The answer may be as easy as adding up an individual’s years. To help shoppers find the best vitamins, minerals, herbs and other nutrients to meet their specific needs, we asked five natural health experts for age-specific supplement recommendations. The consensus: Every person—regardless of age—should pop a multivitamin. Despite a 2011 study in the Archives of Internal Medicine showing that the use of multivitamins doesn’t reduce the risk of death in older women, experts insist that females in this age group should still take a multi. “The major issue [found by the study] was with iron supplementation in postmenopausal women,” says Michael Murray, ND, author of What the Drug Companies Won’t Tell You and Your Doctor Doesn’t Know (Atria, 2009). “Too much iron is linked to an increased risk of heart disease, cancer and possibly infections. Postmenopausal women should look for multiple vitamin and mineral formulas that are iron free.” Beyond this recommendation, here are our experts’ top supplement choices for kids, teens, men, women of childbearing age, and perimenopausal and menopausal women.