> However, a comprehensive medical history—assessing dozens of physical and mental illnesses—revealed zero actual health differences between people who did or did not take multivitamins.

This is probably the point where the asinine line of reasoning in this article derails and hits bottom.

Vitamins and minerals are not for "health", but for body function.

Deficiency in a vitamin or mineral is not necessarily going to show up as a documented physical or mental illness in your someone's medical history.

If vitamin supplements don't do anything (the benefit is all in the mind), then it must mean that if we take a group of people who are under conditions that will cause them to develop scurvy, and we give half of them a vitamin C supplement, keeping the other half as a control group, then that supplemented group will develop scurvy, indistinguishably from the control group.

Supplementing with vitamins or minerals in which one is not deficient is a waste of money, and could cause a harmful excess, depending on the specific substance. But "everyone" knows that. And, yes, people use supplements without obtaining evidence that they are deficient.