If you’ve ever wondered whether those anti ageing vitamins you swallow each morning is doing you any good, a recent report in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition should offer some solid reassurance.
It seems that multivitamins might actually help women live longer by keeping key parts of our DNA from getting shorter.
“This study provides the first epidemiological evidence that multivitamin use is associated with longer leukocyte telomeres among women,” explains lead researcher Dr. Honglei Chen who is in charge of the Aging & Neuroepidemiology Group at the U.S. National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. “It is not yet clear if this association is causal.”
What this means to us non-scientists is that the research was the first to show some evidence of the effects multivitamins on the body.
Multivitamins are a major source of beneficial micronutrients, believed to assist in the management of oxidative stress and chronic inflammation.
Structures called telomeres, found on the end of our chromosomes, work to protect them from damage, but shorten slightly as a natural part of cell division.
Shorter telomere length may be a marker of biological aging as well as being linked to higher risk of chronic diseases and higher mortality rates.
The thinking behind this latest work is that if you could keep this shortening from happening, the new cells would be protected and so slowing the aging process.
Chen’s team performed a cross sectional analysis on data for 586 participants, all women ranging in age from 35 to 74 years old, who were part of the Sisters Study.
This project included women who had breast cancer, as well as cancer free women. One part of that research included a 146-item food frequency questionnaire asking the subjects about their multivitamin use over a 12-year period. Blood samples and DNA testing were also performed.
After the team made statistical adjustments for age and other factors, they found that subjects who took multivitamins daily had longer leukocyte telomeres — on average 5.1% longer than those who did not take vitamins. This works out to almost 9.8 years less age related shortening.
Subjects who got vitamin C and E from dietary sources also had longer telomeres.
Beyond the weaknesses of being an observational study, this work did nothing to prove any health benefits of having longer telomeres.
What’s more, subjects with the longest telomeres weren’t necessarily the most frequent multivitamin users. So for now, this means the research can’t conclusively say that multivitamin use alone was responsible for the effect, or that the effect brings a true benefit.
The director of the Prevention Research Center at Yale University School of Medicine, Dr. David Katz has concerns about the message of the study, “Most recent studies of vitamin supplements have yielded discouraging results,” Katz points out. “This study clearly goes the other way, suggesting that a multivitamin may help protect our chromosomes, and thus ourselves, from aging.”
Until more work is done, taking a multivitamin each day is really a personal decision. If you do decide to give them a try, check with your doctor first, as multivitamins can be troublesome for pregnant women and those with certain medical conditions.
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Does A Daily Multivitamin Prolong Your Life? continued…
Your best bet is to avoid the multivitamin brands listed on ConsumerLab.com and stick with names you know like Centrum, Kirkland, Nature Made and One-A-Day are all good options.
Look at the labels for the United States Pharmacopoeia (USP), NSF International (NSF) or ConsumerLab.com (CL) seals on anything that you buy and are planning to put into your body.
And never, ever take more than the recommended dose of whatever anti ageing vitamin you do choose. When it comes to these nutritional supplements, more is not better.
To your good health,
Kirsten Whittaker
Daily Health Bulletin Editor
