There’s actually a really good reason for that. The body doesn’t have a good way to get rid of excess iron except by bleeding, so it’s fairly easy for someone without a period to get iron poisoning from vitamins with iron in them. Women’s vitamins assume the person taking them loses a significant quantity of blood every month. Not only should men not take them, women whose birth control eliminates their period completely shouldn’t take them either.

I did that with buying “one-a-day” vitamins for seniors because they were a quarter the price of standard men’s vitamins. I checked the stats and ingredients, they were about identical and from the same brand.

Earlier this year a doctor advised us (male and female) to take prenatal vitamins, and yesterday a nutritionist told us the same. They really just have everything anybody needs, apparently.

This isnt entirely related, but your comment made me think about the time I went into CVS to buy multivitamins and noticed all of the “men’s” included a picture of an orange while the “women’s” did not. All the other fruit pictured were the same between the two, but not oranges.

I do this. You’d be shocked at the number of womens supplements that don’t have iron either.