The brain needs many nutrients for optimal health and efficiency, but micronutrients are usually better absorbed from food than supplements.
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Grace Carey/Getty Images
The brain needs many nutrients for optimal health and efficiency, but micronutrients are usually better absorbed from food than supplements.
Grace Carey/Getty Images
Americans spend billions of dollars on supplements each year, 1 in 3 adults reported take a multivitamin. However, there is debate as to whether this helps improve health.
The research team wanted to assess how daily multivitamin intake affects cognitive aging and memory. They followed approximately 3,500 older adults enrolled in a randomized controlled trial. One group of participants received a placebo and another group received a placebo. silver centrum Multivitamin for 3 years. Participants also underwent an online test to assess their memory.
At the end of the first year, those who took the multivitamin showed an improvement in their ability to recall words. Participants were given a list of words that may or may not be related and were asked to memorize as many words as possible. (List learning tests assess an individual’s ability to store and retrieve information.)
Those who took the multivitamin were able to recall about a quarter more words than the placebo group, in other words, they remembered just a few more words.
“We estimate that the effect of the multivitamin intervention was equivalent to 3.1 years of age-related changes in memory and improved memory over placebo,” the authors write in their paper. Published this week in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. And the authors point out there are lasting benefits.
say “this is interesting” Dr. Jeffrey Linder, Director of General Internal Medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, but not involved in research. But the overall effect found in his study was very small, he says. “It seems like a pretty small difference,” Linder says. And he notes that multivitamins had no effect on other cognitive domains assessed in the study, such as executive function, a potentially more important measure.
Research author Dr. Joan MansonThis isn’t the first study to show the benefits of multivitamins, said Brigham and Women’s Hospital’s director of preventive medicine.she points to her study Published last year in Alzheimer’s & Dementia In this study, participants who took a daily multivitamin performed better overall on tests measuring global cognitive function, speech recall, verbal fluency, number ordering, and executive function. was shown.
“It’s amazing that studies have found such a clear signal that it’s effective in slowing age-related memory and cognitive decline,” Manson said. “People who received multivitamins performed better than those who received a placebo.”
Our bodies and brains require many nutrients for optimal health and efficiency. Deficiencies in these nutrients can affect memory loss and accelerate cognitive decline, Manson said. So if you’re not getting all the nutrients you need from your diet, taking a multivitamin may help prevent deficiencies, she says.
“It’s important to emphasize that multivitamins are by no means a healthy meal replacement because micronutrients are usually better absorbed from food than from supplements,” says Manson, but older people It could be a complementary approach or strategy for maintaining the cognitive health of adults,” she says.
Linder said he will continue to tell patients that if they eat a healthy diet, they won’t get much benefit from multivitamins. “If you’re overdosing on a particular supplement and your body doesn’t need it, it’s just peeing,” he says.he wrote An editorial published in JAMA magazine, Many argue that vitamins and supplements can be a waste of money. He argues that we should help people adopt better eating patterns.
“A diet rich in fruits and vegetables is associated with longer life, better function and a better quality of life,” says Linder. Numerous studies have shown that a healthy diet is associated with improved heart health, and when it comes to protecting cognitive function, “the current thinking is that whatever is good for the heart is good for the brain.” he says. .
When Linder talks to her patients about healthy aging, she focuses on good sleep habits, physical activity, and a healthy diet. “My biggest concern about people’s attention to vitamins is that they’re distracting us from what they actually do to help us stay healthy,” Linder said.
“If someone is taking a multivitamin, I don’t tell them to stop,” he says. Dr. R. Sean Morrison, is a geriatrician at Mount Sinai Health System in New York. But he says the effects measured in studies aren’t very convincing, so he doesn’t recommend using multivitamins as a way to prevent memory loss. “I don’t think that’s the silver bullet that people are looking for,” Morrison says. When he also speaks to patients, he focuses on the importance of healthy habits and good social relationships.
This study was funded in part by the National Institutes of Health and other grants. Vitamins were provided by Pfizer and Hareon, makers of Centrum, a brand of multivitamins taken by study participants. The study authors say the funders “had no role” in the design, analysis or interpretation of the study.
