When you are shopping for a good multi vitamin supplement the goal is to find one that will provide your body with all the essential and non-essential nutrients it needs. The big advantage is that you only have to take one tablet or a just a few to get all the nutrients for your body to function correctly. A good quality supplement can go a long way to helping prevent both mineral and vitamin deficiencies. Multi vitamins are used by a large number of people of all ages and genders to increase the level of essential nutrients in their body and reap the health benefits provided by these supplements.

In my opinion a good multi vitamin will contain at least 100% or more of the daily amount of essential vitamins you need to keep yourself healthy. Even though not all multi vitamins contain minerals, in many that do, they even exceed the 100% of the daily amount recommended by physicians.

Here are the minimum nutrients that a good quality multi vitamin supplement should always include: Vitamin A, B-complex, including B1, B2, B3, B4, B5, B6 and B12, Vitamin C, Vitamin K, Vitamin D, and Vitamin E.

In addition the best multi vitamin and multi mineral supplements should have these minerals, Calcium, Copper, Chromium, Iodine, Magnesium, Manganese, Molybdenum, and Zinc. For women I would recommend Iron as well although most of us get enough in our diet. Phosphorous is also a required mineral for our bodies, but we should get it from our diet too.

There are many studies that say we need even more than the multi vitamin and mineral supplements provide and therefore many companies offer a multi vitamin supplement that contains large quantities of Vitamin A, Vitamin C, Vitamin D, B complex, Vitamin K, Zinc, Magnesium, Manganese, Molybdenum and Chromium, with Vitamin E and Calcium supplements available separately. Even though this regimen requires you to take several different tablets, it does ensure that you have the daily amount of essential nutrients to keep yourself healthy.

The vast majority of the one-per-day multi vitamin supplements usually contain B-complex vitamins and varying amounts of vitamin A and vitamin D, depending on the kind of supplement you choose. Some one-a-day multi vitamins have large amounts of vitamin A and D, while others do not. Most multivitamins on the market only have small amounts of essential minerals, such as zinc, iron and copper, since the body does not require them in large quantities.

In our culture it is all but mandatory to take a good multi vitamin to make sure we are getting the nutrients we need. Most of us are not eating a balanced diet and without the vitamins we are setting ourselves up for health issues.