Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy by Walter Willett

Author:Walter Willett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press

• Be as physically active as possible. Engage in a variety of activities to keep your bones healthy and your muscles strong.

• Take 800–1,000 IU of vitamin D a day. Only a few vitamin brands contain this much.

• Get enough vitamin K by eating at least one serving of green leafy vegetables a day.

• Don’t get too much extra preformed vitamin A (retinol) unless prescribed by your doctor. Keep your daily dose from supplements under 2,000 IU.

CHAPTER TEN

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Take a Multivitamin for Insurance

ONCE UPON A TIME, VITAMINS were thought of only as nutrients needed in small amounts to prevent diseases with exotic-sounding names like beri-beri, pellagra, scurvy, and rickets. So nutritional guidelines for vitamins were based on the amount needed to avoid these diseases. Because they were becoming rarer and rarer, it seemed that the vast majority of Americans was getting enough vitamins. Getting more than the amounts needed to prevent those deficiency diseases, from either food or supplements, was a waste, so the thinking went. Or as one critic of vitamin supplements was fond of saying, they are good for nothing more than giving America the “richest urine in the world.”

Some innovative thinking and the wonderful, logical conversation of science has been changing the way we think about vitamins, minerals, and other micronutrients. The biggest shift has been the realization that many cases of chronic diseases such as some cancers and heart disease could be partly due to nutrient deficiencies, just like beri-beri and scurvy. The new findings suggest that some people—probably many people—don’t get enough of these essential micronutrients. By increasing the amount we get, mostly from food but maybe from supplements as well, we could substantially improve our long-term health.

What really blew the cover off the old vitamin-deficiency disease connection was the discovery of a direct link between inadequate intake of the B vitamin folic acid (or folate) and birth defects such as spina bifida and anencephaly. Both of these, collectively called neural tube defects, happen when the tissues destined to become the spinal cord, the bony tube that protects it, and the brain don’t develop as they should during the first twenty-eight days of pregnancy. Spina bifida can cause paralysis and other disabilities. Children with anencephaly are born without most of the brain and spinal cord; they are either stillborn or survive for only a short time after birth. Worldwide, about three hundred thousand babies are born with neural tube defects each year.

Clinical observations that neural tube defects were most common in poor populations with poor diets prompted a search for nutritional causes. In 1976 a British team found that mothers of children with neural tube defects had relatively low levels of micronutrients. The realization that drugs that interfered with folic acid increased the risk of having a child with a neural tube defect helped focus on folate. After the not uncommon scientific seesaw—some studies implicated low folic acid in these birth defects, others didn’t, some small trials showed a benefit for folic acid supplements,

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