Are half of all Americans wasting their money on vitamins?

Millions of Americans who rely on supplements and multivitamins to ward off winter colds are now wondering whether to bother after this week’s report from the Annals of Internal Medicine suggesting that they basically do no good.

Frank Newport, editor in chief of the Gallop Poll, says that 50 percent of Americans take supplemental vitamins — and the propensity to take them increases with one’s level of education. 

General health also correlates to sleep. In 1942, 59 percent of Americans said they got eight hours of sleep or more — contrasted with today, when only 34 percent get that much. (But that’s actually an increase from just over 20 years ago.) More Americans that that — 43 percent — consider themselves to be sleep deprived.

And new statistics from the government show that 38 percent of Americans have dropped their land lines to rely exclusively on cell phones. In 2003, only 3 percent didn’t have a land line. This is unsurprisingly inversely proportional to age; the older the respondent, the more likely he or she is to have a land line.