Multivitamins exist to support your dietary health and keep you topped up to support performance.
However, the market for these supplements is broad with a great deal of variety, and different brands/products come with different quality or ingredients.
How do you know where to look and what matters?
Today, we’re bringing you our guide to the Best Multivitamins for Men in 2021 and what they can do for you – as well as recommending our top three products.
Stick around if you’re ready to commit to health and performance while getting the most for your money.
Why Should I Care About The Best Multivitamins For Men?
The point of a multivitamin is to take a broad, catch-all approach to the most important vitamins and minerals that you may need to support your diet.
These often include difficult-to-get compounds like vitamin D or Magnesium which are essential for everything from health to performance.
While men benefit from consuming a wide range of vitamins and minerals, particularly important nutrients for men include:
- Zinc, especially important for fertility.
- Calcium: as men age, the risk of osteoporosis increases, and yes, it affects men too.
- Vitamin D to help absorb the calcium.
- Potassium to balance excess sodium, particularly beneficial for overweight men.
- Magnesium: involved in more than 300 body processes, may stop stress hormones from passing to the brain so potentially useful for men with stressful fast-paced jobs.
- Selenium, helps control metabolism, keeps reproductive organs functioning properly.
It’s all too easy to be deficient in some element of nutrition, despite best intentions, and you may not even notice until you start to suffer for it.
The USDA already warns that most men are deficient in most key nutrients.
It advises boosting your intake of leafy greens by around 350% for men over 30, along with eating 150% more fruit each day.
It also warns of serious deficiencies in vitamin D, zinc, and magnesium at clinical and sub-clinical levels.
Basically, we’re a deficient population and it’s not always easy to address this with food: in which case, gender-specific multivitamins are a useful addition.
The point is to combat deficiency in any of these essentials and provide a supplementary dose of anything that you could benefit from.
Getting 100-200% of your RDA from a high-quality multivitamin is a great habit to support health and prevent these problems affecting you.
How Many Vitamins Do You Need?
Some nutrients are just about preventing deficiency while others have pro-health, or pro-performance, benefits.
Taking a multivitamin is a great way to get both of these and support overall wellness.
Remember that multivitamins are great, but they should be taken as an adjunct to a great diet, rather than a replacement for one.
They can help you support your overall wellbeing but aren’t a replacement for good habits – they won’t make you healthy if you’re living on kebabs and sugary drinks.
Getting the best quality multivitamin provides a way of improving your diet in a single, simple, effective capsule.
It should also be specific to your needs as a man, as male and female physiology and nutritional needs differ – meaning more vitamin D as you age, and enough vitamin B to support energy transfer, metabolism, and sexual health!
The best multivitamins are those that provide the best quantity, quality, and customer satisfaction across these key nutrients.
Best Multivitamin For Men
1. Performance Lab Whole-Food Multivitamin for Men
What Is It?
Performance Lab Whole-Food Multivitamin for Men offers a high-quality approach to a complete male-performance multivitamin.
Its science-driven formula provides a great variety, quantity, and quality of essential nutrients while supporting male interests and providing peace of mind.
This is a good example of how a brand’s ethos on supplements and their manufacturing practice can make a difference to your results.
We like Performance Lab for its commitment to quality, as well as its pledge to use the most natural possible sources.
The end result is a product with an exceptionally clean label (non-GMO, no soy, no gluten, no synthetic additives etc.), as well as one that is GMP certified, and which uses a production process that creates nature-identical vitamins and minerals in a highly bioavailable form.
It is also vegan-friendly.
How It Works?
To start with, Performance Lab Whole-Food Multi for Men includes 28 nutrients, with the dosages of 18 of them at 100% or greater.
These hit the necessary recommended Daily Value with a single serving and really take the pressure off of your diet.
Areas of specific focus for men include:
- B vitamins
- Vitamin D
- Zinc
- Boron
- Potassium
- Magnesium
- Selenium
What we really love about this product is the commitment to better quality in simple, foundational ways.
With the clean label (non-GMO, vegan, natural and synthetic-free, gluten-free, soy-free, etc.) that we mentioned above, you’re getting exactly what you need without any of the unnecessary fluff you might see in lower-quality products.
Quantities of nutrients in this product are at sensible levels, too – many at 100% DV but no mega-doses that could cause problems.
Likewise, getting the best quality of nutrients in the most whole-food and bioavailable form possible ensures you’re getting more from every multivitamin you consume.
When it comes to a quality-first supplement, Performance Lab is the clear leader.
Focusing on the basics (and doing them well) is one of the best things about Performance Lab’s Whole-Food Multivitamin for Men and it’s what we look for in an effective dietary supplement.
Everything else is a bonus but secondary concern.
Benefits
- Nature-identical vitamins and minerals perform better, with a natural and bioavailable structure to provide more benefits per-gram.
- Clean label ensures you’re getting what you need – no junk products, no harmful ingredients, and no common allergens.
- Effective dose and variety are key to multivitamin performance. With 100% or more across most nutrients, you’re definitely going to be prepared for life.
- Offers brand synergy. Performance Lab’s whole range is designed to work together to provide additional benefits, with compounds like the SPORT fat burner providing a pro-absorption compound that makes it the perfect combo for better health and performance during a diet.
- Includes a prebiotic-infused Plantcaps® capsule for digestive comfort.
Prices & Packages
Performance Lab Whole-Food Multi can only be bought from the manufacturer’s website at www.performancelab.com.
2. Animal Pak Multivitamin
What Is It?
The Animal range by Universal Nutrition has a good reputation for supplementation for strength sports, where they have gained popularity with powerlifters and bodybuilders.
Animal Pak, or as it the manufacturers also refer to it, the ‘Ultimate Training Pack’, is a multivitamin complex intended to support the ‘hardest and heaviest trainers on planet Earth’.
The Animal Pak multivitamin complex is complete in the sense of providing an effective balance of key vitamins, as well as a variety of secondary ingredients that have very specific benefits to performance – more than 60 nutrients in all.
This isn’t a multivitamin for every man, but it is definitely the vitamin and mineral supplement for a performance enthusiast or strength sport competitor.
How It Works?
It could be argued that Animal Pak goes for quantity over quality as well as specific extras for their main fans: bodybuilders, powerlifters, and other strength and power athletes.
It’s not a nature-identical product and some of the vitamin/mineral sources aren’t up to the quality of Performance Lab’s standard but are included in huge quantities to try and make up for it.
This makes it a somewhat “shotgun approach” to supporting health and wellbeing which keeps it out of our top spot but has some merit if you’re really blasting your body through huge workout volumes.
If you’re not doing this, there’s a good chance you’re going to excrete a lot of these vitamins and nutrients as your body might not need them.
However, you are going to be getting at least 16 vitamins and minerals at 100% of your RDA or higher (though some are exceptionally high).
The secondary ingredients are pretty cool, but they’re sport- and goal-oriented benefits that might not apply to everyone.
This is clear when we look at compounds like creatine or beta-alanine which are needed in small amounts for non-athletes but make up a significant part of the
Animal Pak’s proprietary performance blends.
This is still a great product, but it needs to match your goals for the best effects.
Benefits
- Variety and dose of ingredients should provide effective support on key vitamins and minerals.
- Some strength – and performance-specific compounds that can support you amazingly, depending on your goals and training style.
- Great reputation and proven results in highly-demanding strength sports.
Prices & Packages
Available on Amazon.com.
3. Optimum Nutrition Opti-Men
What Is It?
Optimum Nutrition has a big reputation in the supplement industry when it comes to bodybuilding and physique.
Their whey products have made them popular – but Opti-Men is their attempt at a top-quality multivitamin for men.
This product is described as a high-potency multivitamin for active men.
It has certain similarities with Animal Pak as a performance multivitamin (though it isn’t as quite ‘in-your-face’ as the latter), but doesn’t overlap with the whole-food, quality-first approach of Performance Lab.
Again, this makes for a great supplement if it fits your goals.
How It Works?
The quantity of key nutrients is comparable to Animal Pak across the board (75+ ingredients, with 25 vitamins and essential minerals), though there are clear problems with this, as we discussed above.
For most people, quantity is inferior to quality since excreted nutrients are quite likely, but if you’re pushing your body, they can be a great recovery aid.
Being way above RDA can be useful for compounds like B vitamins, but this amount requires you to be taking on a lot of workout volume.
This means that Opti-Men is covering the same niche as Animal Pak and losing in some areas, though we do think it’s a tough competition.
Opti-Men provides 17 of the 26 essential vitamins and minerals at 100% RDA or greater, which is great. This doesn’t provide the same assurance as Performance Lab due to the quality and source, but it does ensure you’re getting a boost on a wide variety of key nutrients.
There are also a number of secondary ingredients that may provide benefits to performance in specific fields, though it would be better if they weren’t hidden behind proprietary blends.
The blends include:
- Amino Men Blend, BCAAs plus extras, 1g
- Phyto Men Blend (22 fruit and vegetable-based extracts), 100mg
- Viri Men Blend (50mg of ‘virility-related’ ingredients such as Saw Palmetto, Panax Ginseng, Raw Oyster Concentrate)
- Enzyme Blend, 50mg.
These are a bonus, but we can’t say how good since there’s no clear individual dosages and we can’t compare them with Animal Pak 1-1 (though granted, Animal Pak also contains one proprietary blend too).
Compounds like choline and Lutein are great, while the antioxidant complex is beneficial to healthy aging and overall wellbeing.
These are especially important since male neurotransmitter health dips significantly from the mid-30s onwards.
Benefits
- Effective dosages – this can be really useful if you have huge micronutrient needs due to training and recovery demands.
- Good brand reputation, providing peace of mind on customer service and 3rd party testing.
- Secondary ingredients could be cool, but we don’t know the content so it’s hard to draw comparisons with Animal Pak.
- Great price.
Prices & Packages
Opti-Men is available on Amazon.com.
Our Final Thoughts
A good multivitamin is one that covers the basics as well as possible.
We prefer quality to quantity, but we’ve seen examples of both on this list and the products we recommend are designed to support a healthy diet where you should already be getting plenty of vitamins and minerals.
The best multivitamin supplements for men in 2021 is the one that suits your goals and provides the best quality of nutrients.
Opti-Men provides a good example of a performance multi with a great price-point. Animal Pak beats it on a number of key secondary ingredients but comes at a higher price.
If you’re looking for a competitive strength/power/physique multivitamin, either of these can be a great choice.
However, when it comes to a male-specific multivitamin for health, wellbeing, and nutritional support, we prefer the Performance Lab Whole-Food Multivitamin for Men.
With a focus on a clean label, responsible supplements, and nature-identical nutrients, we’re firm believers in Performance Lab’s Multi – and we think it is a good product to set the standard for what you should be looking for.