Don't Take Your Vitamins

A massive study has found that there is no measurable health benefit from taking a daily multi-vitamin. There are many such studies as to individual vitamins, with some studies even finding that Vitamins A and E are harmful.

I take several capsules of fish oil, 5,000 IU of Vitamin D, and -- the benefits of this are a bit more speculative -- alpha-lipoic acid and acetyl-l-carnitine. Alpha-lipoic acid is a powerful antioxidant, and several studies¹ suggest that along with acetyl-l-carnitine, it can reverse the aging process and improve brain functioning. But who knows: in another 10 or 15 years, some massive study may show that these supplements aren't useful either.


¹The studies are these:

Jiankang Liu, David W. Killilea, and Bruce N. Ames,
Age-associated mitochondrial oxidative decay: Improvement of carnitine acetyltransferase substrate-binding affinity and activity in brain by feeding old rats acetyl-L-carnitine and/or R-alpha-lipoic acid, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 99, no. 4 (Feb. 19, 2002): pp. 1876–1881;

Tory M. Hagen, Jiankang Liu, Jens Lykkesfeldt, Carol M. Wehr†, Russell T. Ingersoll, Vladimir Vinarsky, James C. Bartholomew, and Bruce N. Ames, Feeding acetyl-L-carnitine and lipoic acid to old rats significantly improves metabolic function while decreasing oxidative stress, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 99, no. 4 (Feb. 19, 2002): pp. 1870–1875;

Jiankang Liu, Elizabeth Head, Afshin M. Gharib, Wenjun Yuan, Russell T. Ingersoll, Tory M. Hagen, Carl W. Cotman, and Bruce N. Ames, Memory loss in old rats is associated with brain mitochondrial decay and RNA/DNA oxidation: partial reversal by feeding acetyl-L-carnitine and/or R-alpha-lipoic acid, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 99, no. 4 (Feb. 19, 2002): pp. 2356–2361.