9.8 Years Younger

Do you take a multivitamin?

The reason I’m asking you is that I’ve got some important evidence about what multivitamins do that even I didn’t know before now.

Let me explain…

Aging is something that begins on a cellular level. It starts with telomeres. They’re the timekeepers attached to every strand of your DNA. But they get shorter each time your cells divide – until eventually, cell division stops and cells die. The shorter your telomeres are, the older your cells act – and the older you look and feel as a result.

So the solution is to stop your telomeres from shortening.

And that’s just what multivitamins have been found to do for women. A study of only women, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, found that those who simply take a multivitamin have 5 percent longer telomeres than those women who don’t.1

The study says that translates into 9.8 years – almost a full decade – during which you’ll stay younger.

You know I always recommend food as the best source of nutrients. But unless you’re the rare exception, you’re probably not getting what you need from food alone these days.

The typical American diet is filled with processed foods, sugars, starches, and hormone- and pesticide-laden meats and veggies. These foods are loaded with chemicals and bad fats that speed up aging and bring on chronic disease.

But with the hundreds of vitamin brands that line the shelves, which one do you choose?

Here’s what to do:

• Pick the formula that’s right for you. Women have different nutrition needs at different stages in their lives. For instance, menstruating women need to have enough iron to make up for what they’re losing from blood. Pregnant women need folic acid to prevent fetal birth defects. And post-menopausal women need extra calcium to make up for the calcium their bones lose after the first five years of menopause.

  That’s why your best bet is to go with a multivitamin designed for your age group and health status (pregnancy, menopause, etc.).

• Go natural. Choose a multivitamin without synthetic forms of vitamins, but natural forms from nature’s best source: food. Also, select a multivitamin that’s free of dyes, preservatives, fillers and binders. These artificial ingredients can interfere with nutrient absorption.
• Pay attention to bioavailability. When nutrients are bio-available, it means they can get through your digestive system and into your blood, where they can start doing their work. This is critical because stomach acids and other enzymes can destroy the absorption of nutrients. So vitamin supplements must be formulated in a way to ensure that they get into your bloodstream. But many aren’t. And as a result, these vitamins wind up in your pee instead of your blood. If a supplement is formulated for bio-availability, it’s usually something the manufacturer will brag about on the label.
• Look for good quality control. Choose a supplement that’s made by an NSF-certified facility. NSF is an international nonprofit organization dedicated to consumer safety – and the leading source of quality control initiatives in the nutrition industry. An NSF certification means three words: thorough quality control. And that means that the multivitamin has been created according to good manufacturing practices (GMPs), contains the ingredient listed on the label and is free of contaminants. The easiest way to tell if your multivitamin is NSF-certified is to check for the NSF logo on the label, or check the NSF site to look it up.
• Buy a brand that you know and trust. Avoid Walgreens, Walmart, and your local grocery store if you can. Not that I have anything against these discount stores, but when I checked into their formulas, I found they they buy the cheapest ingredients on the international market. These tend to be synthetic. And when it comes to your health, this is one place where I don’t recommend cutting corners.

To Your Good Health,

Al Sears, MD

Xu, Q.,”Multivitamin use and telomere length in women,”Am. J. Clin. Nutr. June 2009;89(6):1857-63