Yet another reason to pop a daily multivitamin: New research shows it can reduce at least one risk factor for heart disease. Patients who took a multi for six months showed a 32 percent drop in their blood levels of C-reactive protein, a marker of arterial inflammation that’s increasingly a culprit in heart disease.

“It’s pretty exciting to see something this cheap and this safe have such a dramatic effect,” says Timothy Church, a physician and medical director of the Cooper Institute in Dallas, Texas, who conducted the study. “The reduction was similar to what you’d get with statin drugs.”

It’s not clear which aspects of the vitamin are responsible for the CRP drop. Previous studies have linked certain vitamins in a multi—specifically, B-6, C, and E—to lower CRP levels, but the pill’s strong performance could not be entirely accounted for by those three, Church says. “It’s entirely possible there’s a synergy between ingredients that’s boosting the effect.”

And though it’s worth noting that the Cooper Institute is affiliated with the company that manufactures the multivitamin used in the study—the Cooper Complete—Church says that any high-quality multivitamin with a comparable for-mula is likely to produce similar results.