New research shows that multivitamins help maintain memory

There have been studies, published in reputable journals, that have shown time and time again that they don’t do much. They don’t stop heart attacks. They do not stop strokes. They don’t stop cancer. Yet we continue to take them.

Americans spend billions of dollars annually on multivitamins. I’m not talking about all the other supplements we take, just the old multivitamins like the ones my mom used to give me.

As a kid, I remember she gave me liquid vitamins, which I can still taste in my mouth today. I think it contains cod liver oil. For those who remember, it was about the worst thing you had to swallow as a kid. yuk!

Anyway, Americans are said to have the most expensive urine in the world. We only take vitamins. We sort them out, and they don’t do much for us.

We need vitamins, especially children. Vitamin D deficiency causes rickets, and milk has concentrated vitamin D added to it. Niacin deficiency causes pellagra. There were 250,000 cases annually in the United States in the 1930s. A deficiency of thiamine causes beriberi.

These problems were eliminated by adding vitamins to enriched flour, which Wonder Bread Co. did. In collaboration with the US government in World War II. And now we have folic acid added to flour, which has greatly reduced neural tube defects, spina bifida.

Obviously, we need vitamins. But what about that daily capsule?

About a decade ago, I was in a study where 50,000 men and women took a multivitamin and vitamin E capsule. When the results of the study became known, 10 years after the study began, it showed none of these multivitamin products did anything with regard to life, death, heart attacks, strokes, or cancer.

And here I thought, why did I swallow these things? Cheap multivitamins. You can buy a year’s worth of Centrum, one of the best-selling brands, for about $20. cheap. But why take it?

Well, new research shows that maybe, just maybe, there is a benefit. A Harvard study showed that taking a daily multivitamin seemed to slow age-related memory decline.

The study included 3,500 men and women, age 60, who were randomly assigned to take a daily multivitamin or a placebo for three years. At the end of each year, the participants took a series of online cognitive assessments at home designed to test memory function in the hippocampus, a region of the brain affected by normal aging.

This is part of a longitudinal study called COSMOS – Cocoa and Multivitamin Supplement Outcomes Study – designed to see if a multivitamin or cocoa flavanols would improve health. It’s going on. The jury is still out on Cocoa.

By the end of the first year, people taking a daily multivitamin had improved memory, compared to those taking a placebo. The researchers estimate that the improvement, sustained over the three-year study period, was equivalent to about three years of age-related memory decline. The effect was more pronounced in participants with underlying cardiovascular disease.

These findings are consistent with other COSMOS findings showing that a daily multivitamin appears to improve general cognition, memory recall, and attention – more sustainably in people with underlying cardiovascular disease.

The researchers speculate that “people with cardiovascular disease may have lower levels of micronutrients that a multivitamin would correct, but we don’t really know at this time why the effect is stronger in this group.”

my spin: I will start taking a multivitamin. Tablet, not the liquid my mom used to give me. I am convinced that the upside is probably significant, the downside is zero. stay well.