The quest to stay upright and functional in one's golden years may have a surprisingly mundane solution: a daily multivitamin. New research suggests that popping a multivitamin every day could help older adults maintain the ability to do things like walking, climbing stairs, and not feeling like a wrung-out dishrag.

After three years, adults aged 60 and older who took a daily multivitamin reported significantly better functional health scores than those who got a placebo. The findings, presented at NUTRITION 2026 by Bayu B. Bekele, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow at the Georgia Prevention Institute of the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University, suggest that multivitamins might help preserve day-to-day functioning through benefits to cognitive health, circulation, and physical endurance.

"What makes this work unique is our focus on functional health, how people actually feel and function in their daily lives - rather than just the prevention of major diseases," said Bekele, who conducted the research with Regents' Professor Yanbin Dong. The analysis included over 16,000 adults from the COcoa Supplement Multivitamins Outcomes Study (COSMOS), who were randomly assigned to receive a multivitamin, cocoa extract, both, or a placebo.

After three years, the multivitamin group had better scores on the Kansas City Cardiomyopathy Questionnaire, particularly in symptom burden and the clinical summary score (which combines symptom burden and physical ability). "Multivitamin use supporting heart health and overall physical function may help maintain the ability to perform everyday activities such as dressing, bathing, walking, climbing stairs, jogging or hurrying, and completing household chores," Bekele noted. Cocoa extract, meanwhile, only showed a significant benefit for participants with congestive heart failure.

But before you start stockpiling Centrum, researchers emphasize that supplements are not a substitute for a balanced diet or exercise. Also, this is preliminary research presented at a conference, so it hasn't undergone the rigorous peer review process that would make it science's version of a certified pre-owned vehicle. Still, for older adults looking to keep doing their own laundry, a daily multivitamin might be a low-risk addition to a healthy lifestyle - assuming they remember to take it.