Acting Young or Acting Your Age- How to Stay Younger Longer

I have to admit it has been a long time since someone told me to “act my age.” Several decades, since I was a child and a grumpy adult chided me for being childish. I think most people have given up. I have learned to enjoy life with a kind of child-like wonder and amusement. Beats being grumpy.

Here is what most people do not realize. Mood, yours and mine, may partly be a reflection of vitamin status.

A randomized trial published in the multi vitamin literature showed that, after four weeks of daily multivitamin supplementation, both mood and depressive symptoms improved in healthy adults. That is a short window. The fact that anything moved at all in four weeks is worth your attention.

Why a multivitamin matters after 50

Studies in the same literature have shown improvements in inflammatory biomarkers like high sensitivity C reactive protein in adults on a daily multi over months. Inflammation accumulates with age. In the late 1950s, Dr. Denham Harman proposed the free radical theory of aging. Most of the field still respects the framework, even after sixty years of refinement and competing theories. Inflammation and oxidative damage are real drivers of how we age. Treating them seriously is reasonable.

Telomere length follows the same logic. Several observational studies have reported that long term multivitamin users tend to have longer telomeres than non users. Cause is harder to prove than correlation here, but the signal has been consistent.

Add in the well documented decline in nutrient density of modern food, even what is grown in good soil, and the case for a real multi gets harder to argue with. You cannot eat your way out of every nutrient gap, even with a serious whole food diet.

What “real” means in a multivitamin

Most one a day multis are dosed for label compliance, not biological effect. A real multivitamin for an adult over 50 should include:

• Methylated B vitamins, particularly methylfolate and methylcobalamin (B12)
• Vitamin D3 at a serious dose, paired with vitamin K2
• Magnesium in a bioavailable form, not magnesium oxide
• Zinc and selenium at studied doses
• Mixed tocopherols and tocotrienols, not just alpha tocopherol
• A serving size of two to four capsules, because you cannot fit a real dose of these nutrients into one pill

Whether you take mine or someone else’s, those are the boxes to check.

Doc

Dr. Harman, who proposed the free radical theory of aging, passed away in 2014 at 98, after a short illness. He ran two miles a day well into his eighties. He did not act his age.

— Doc