No supplement is essential if you have a good diet.
If you have a fairly good diet, but don’t really know whether you’re short on one micro or another, it might be worthwhile to waste a small amount of money on a multivitamin, where almost all of it will go to waste but it’ll cover up a gap if you’re short on chromium or something.
If you don’t eat a lot of seafood, you might consider a high quality fish oil supplement - it’s not critical, but increased omega-3s from a good source is good for the heart and brain.
If you do much strength training, you might wish to add creatine, which would be hard to get in therapeutic levels from a healthy amount of food - it helps your muscles have more energy available when they’re doing something high intensity, and over time there’s reason to think it’ll help your brain be a little sharper too.
Overall though, it’s not that hard to get a diet that’s good enough and requires no supplements. I mean, some help in one way or another, sure - Maybe a probiotic helps you with one thing, or some psyllium husk, maybe the multi gives you peace of mind - But if you want the low effort, 90+% benefit approach, just eat a good diet.
(types into google ‘what are essential vitamins’)
There are 13 essential vitamins. This means that these vitamins are required for the body to work properly.
They are:
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A healthy diet provides all of this and much much more.
I think multivitamins are pretty useless if you have a healthy diet considering you should be able to get most of them from food. But as someone who is very physically active and does a lot of weight training, I take creatine, collagen, turmeric, glutamine, glucosamine, and chondroitin to help with performance and recovery. I can’t pinpoint which one has had the biggest impact, but ever since I started taking them together my joints have felt much better.
It’s hard to consistently get the full range of vitamins you need. I cook 5/7 times using veggies and ‘healthy’ options but since I started taking a multi vitamin 2 years ago I got sick once (as opposed to what felt like once/2 months)