LiveLongAgeWell

Over the last several years as more studies come out regarding vitamin supplementation and health, I have been decreasing the number and milligram “dose” of the vitamins I take. For example, I used to take vitamin E (as the more difficult to find, but more valuable “mixed tocopherol” form) 200 IU once per day, and now I take that same amount but three times a week. The one vitamin supplement though I recently added is vitamin D3, a single 1000 IU pill on most days.

Just this month another report about vitamin D and its possible “brain protective” effect appeared in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease. The author suggests people over 60 have their vitamin D level checked, and strongly consider vitamin D3 supplements or…get more sunshine.  This is not the first researcher to suggest vitamin D is “neuroprotective”. Earlier this year there was a large U.S. study showing that people with low vitamin D blood levels were more than twice as likely to have dementia as people with high blood levels. Of course, this doesn’t prove that taking vitamin D will cut your risk for dementia, but it seems likely, and for me, I think the potential benefits of daily 1000 IU of vitamin D3 far outweighs any risks.

I was surprised to see a report in the June American Journal of Medicine. The author examined health habits on over 15,000 adults over two different time periods: 1988 through 1994 and 2001 through 2006. The question was: are people practicing a healthier lifestyle now than they were 15 to 20 years ago? The answer is that currently, more people are doing worse when it comes to good health habits!

Yes, more people in the current study are obese (36 percent now vs. 28 percent in the older study), fewer people are exercising regularly (now 43%, and it was 53%), and even worse, the percentage of people who eat five or more servings of vegetables and fruits daily dropped from 42% to the current level of only 26%.

All this despite a flood of health information in the media, including blogs like this. Maybe people are becoming overloaded with health information and just… tune it out? Perhaps the constant flood of data, combined with contradictions from study to study, leads people to think: why bother? What do you think?

I guess the only good news from this is that if YOU choose to live a reasonably healthy life (in short: eat a good diet, exercise and keep your weight under control), you will  look better and better as you get older compared with the growing number of people who are all also getting older, but who aren’t taking care of themselves like you are.