Best Vegan Multivitamin for Athletes – Reviews & Top Picks

As more and more people are switching to a vegan diet, the range of vegan supplements and vitamins continues to grow.

Since vegans cannot eat certain natural sources of vitamins and minerals, many rely on multivitamins to get their essential nutrients.

But how easy is it to find multivitamins or supplements that support a vegan diet, and which is the best vegan multivitamin for your needs?

A varied, wholesome vegan diet provides the human body with almost all the essential nutrients you need to stay in good health, though “almost” is the key word. This isn’t a criticism of the vegan lifestyle, but rather modern farming and food processing methods that make it harder for everyone – not just vegans – to get all the nutrients we need from diet alone.

Therefore, we should try to supplement our diet with the essential vitamins and minerals that we cannot find in our food to stay in good health. However, many health supplements contain animal products that aren’t suitable for vegan diets (such as fish oil-based omega-3 supplements), so how can you stay in tip-top shape on a vegan diet and what is the best vegan multivitamin on the market?

Is there a multivitamin for vegans?

Finding the best multivitamin to support an athletic lifestyle can be tough at the best of times, never mind when you’re restricted by a vegan diet. While it might seem easy (tons of vitamins like vitamin C come from plants after all), many multivitamins use animal by-products such as gelatine in their production, which is a big no-no for vegans.

Fortunately, there are a growing number of supplement brands that produce 100% vegan multivitamins for all the plant-based athletes out there. While there are too many to easily list here, there are dozens of multivitamins on the market, all striving to be recognised as the best vegan multivitamin.

Can vegans just take a multivitamin?

Whether you’ve recently adopted a vegan diet or have been avoiding cheese since Chuck Norris was on TV, concerns about getting enough vitamins and minerals through your diet are nothing new. Even though vegetarians and omnivores will happily claim that you can’t get your recommended levels of essential nutrients on a vegan diet alone, reaching for a multivitamin might not be the quick fix you think it is…

Despite their cure-all reputation, multivitamins are the definition of “jack of all trades, master of none,” because they contain lots of vitamins, but rarely the right ones for your specific health needs. The best vegan multivitamins should be tailored to the unique dietary requirements of the vegan diet to help you get all the essential nutrients you need, but most aren’t unfortunately.

Also Read: Supplements for Sugar Cravings

How many multivitamins should a vegan take daily?

As with any question on nutrition and supplements, there is no one-size-fits-all answer, and you should always tailor your supplement use to your specific needs. While vegans are more likely to be deficient in nutrients like calcium, generic multivitamins won’t help to address these issues, so you should try to find supplements for your specific vitamin deficiencies if any.

However, if you can find multivitamins tailored to vegan dietary needs (one rich in vitamin B12, zinc and omega-3s for example), then that could be an excellent way to maintain healthy levels of your essential nutrients. And if you can find some of the best vegan multivitamins with all the essential nutrients that are hard to find in a plant-based diet, recommended doses for multivitamins tend to only be one or two pills a day, so you won’t have to take too many pills anyway.

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