Live Younger Now!

A recent study published in the Journal of Neurology Neurosurgery and Psychiatry contained a striking finding. The study found that people who had low blood levels of folic acid at the beginning and at the end of the study were almost 3.5 times more likely to develop dementia. This was a relatively small study and it would be easy to ignore except that there are at least 4 or 5 other studies over the past few years that have come to the same conclusion.

Why doesn’t the press pick up on the studies that paint a more positive picture for dietary supplements?  Three studies published in the Feb. 23, 2009 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine presents some positive results.  First, National Institutes of Health researchers following nearly half a million older adults found that increasing calcium consumption in women was associated with a lower risk of developing cancer.

Also, NIH researchers examined blood vitamin D levels in the US population to see if there was any relationship to frequency of colds.  Sure enough, the higher the blood level of viatimin D, the lower the frequency of reported upper respiratory tract infections.

The third study is an important clinical trial on the use of B vitamins for the prevention of age-related macular degeneration (AMD).  In this study, 5442 women, 40 years of age and older, who had some eveident of heart disease, were randomly assigned to tak a dietary supplement of folic acid, vitamin B6, and vitamin B12, or a placebo.  After an average of 7.3 years of taking the diatary supplements, those taking the supplemental B vitamins had a 34% lower risk of developing AMD than those taking the placedbo.