quel - Our food isn't that denatured - sure organic veggies are richer in certain things but there's still plenty of goodness even in fresh factory farmed fruit and veg. Most North Americans eat more than enough calories, in fact we eat too much of the wrong thing and that has more to do with ill health than anything else. It's overconsumption that's killing us, not lack of vitamins (though no doubt there are people in the US - and the UK and Canada - who manage to eat all "food substances" that lack actual food content but a vitamin pill isn't going to help them!). Most of us need less, not more.

If you're not a big all-in-one meal eater (which isn't the best way to eat really anyway), as long as you snack on healthy things throughout the day, you should be fine. If you're not actually hungry then there's a good chance you're eating as much and what your body needs (or you're really distracted and busy! ;-)

One of Big Vita's selling strategies is to tell people that they can't get the nutrition you need from food so you HAVE to take their potion to be healthy. Food is 'unnatural" but vitamins which are synthetic are sold as "natural"? That's really ass backwards and ridiculous if you stop to think even for a minute. Remember, these people can lie with impunity and actually sell you something dangerous as being healthy because they've managed to avoid being regulated. It's an industry that lobbies heavily, that has a just as well developed (and less regulated) propaganda arm as Big Pharma, that rakes in huge (and I do mean huge) amounts of cash, and that promotes pseudoscience to the point where they're actually willing to endanger people's lives for profit.

All that said, taking a basic multivitamin certainly won't hurt you. It's high doses that tend to be dangerous.