Smart Fat by Steven Masley M.D

Author:Steven Masley, M.D.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-12-06T16:00:00+00:00

Multivitamins

If you want to meet some basic vitamin and mineral needs all at once, a multivitamin is a great place to start. However, no single multivitamin will have enough of every vitamin and mineral that your body needs. For example, some minerals, such as calcium and magnesium, are made up of molecules that are literally too big to fit into a multivitamin, at least in doses that would be meaningful. If you’ve ever wondered why some tablets and capsules look like “horse pills,” it’s usually because the molecular structure of the active ingredients is naturally large, complex, and bulky. Ideally, pills shouldn’t be too big to swallow comfortably. That’s why the “serving size” on some high-quality multivitamins is often two to three pills (or more).

One of the reasons your personal physician may not recommend a multivitamin is that most multivitamin studies to date have been done using multivitamins with very poor-quality ingredients that neither of us would recommend. Studies using a poor-quality multivitamin did not decrease the risk of heart attacks and strokes, and these no-benefit studies received a very high level of coverage in the medical literature. For reasons we fail to understand, researchers designing large-scale multivitamin studies in the past have insisted that the ingredients combined had to be ultra-cheap (usually as low as pennies per day), which obviously limits their effectiveness. Furthermore, getting people to volunteer for a multivitamin study is very difficult. A study published in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association showed that people enrolling for multivitamin studies ate vastly better than average Americans in the first place, which greatly limited the benefit that would have been shown for the average American.

Yet, despite the poor-quality ingredients used, national multivitamin studies have revealed more benefits than your doctor may want to admit. Solid studies have shown that taking even a poor-quality multivitamin daily decreases your risk for cancer and decreases damage to your DNA. We believe the benefits of taking a high-quality multivitamin greatly outweigh any risk, and we highly recommend that you take a multivitamin daily.

Some ingredients suggest that a supplement is being made with inferior ingredients, similar to those used in the national studies noted. When you see these, start looking for a better quality supplement brand. Here are a few examples:

Beta carotene → Instead, look for mixed carotenoids.

Alpha tocopherol → Instead, look for mixed tocopherols.

Magnesium oxide → Instead, look for magnesium citrate, magnesium glycinate, magnesium malate, or a chelated form of magnesium.

Folic acid → Instead, look for mixed folates. The most absorbable and metabolically active kind of folate is 5-methyltetrahydrofolate.

Zinc-to-copper ratio >10–20 → Instead, look for a zinc-to-copper ratio that is at least 20 or more. Copper and zinc that aren’t in the right balance can increase the risk for cancer. The fact is that you can get all the copper you need from eating healthy food, so if your supplement has zinc and omits copper, that’s just fine (like the foods on the Smart Fat plan). Make sure you have at least 20–25 parts zinc for each part copper.

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