Vit & Mineral ProElite

I cannot prove it, but I am convinced of it. Call it an educated guess. While I'm writing this, a jar of multivitamins stands on the table before me – and owing to these cheap pills I will live ten years longer than I would without. At least. It might be twenty years.  

As a science writer I wrote a few articles about nutritionists who studied the diets of the elderly. Until recently there really wasn't much information about what pensioners eat, how much protein, vitamins and minerals they consume. All attention went to growing children and young people, of whom it is obvious that they react well to a good diet. For the elderly, nutrition is less important, scientists assumed. Elderly people decline, and there is no stopping that.

That idea of the inevitable decline is now on the slope. Large epidemiological studies have proven that your lifestyle can determine whether you will become sixty or eighty. Ninety even maybe. And that is why, for about the last ten years, nutritionists have been looking into the diet of pensioners. The conclusion of these researches is that there are hardly any pensioners who eat right. “It is really too bizarre,” one scientist summarized his results once, “we live in this fabulously wealthy country. But in this country, our elderly are malnourished on a big scale.”

And this does not only go for the Netherlands. In Italy nutritionists were also shocked by the quality  of the food their elderly ate. There, scientists of the University of Padua have monitored a group of people over 70 for ten years. When this research started, the people still ate pretty well – better than their Dutch peers - even though about half of them did not get enough vitamin B1. Ten years later, half the elderly had a vitamin A and vitamin B2 deficiency, and a percentage suffered a lack of vitamin C. And the Italians only checked the vitamin A, B1, B2 and C levels, so you can safely assume that the intake of the other vitamins are as depressing.

Well... depressing? I count myself lucky when I read results like these. Not because I dislike the elderly, but because I would like to become old as Methuselah, while keeping my excellent health. These studies on the nutrition of the elderly tell me how.

Right. Blank faces. This requires some explanation.

People over 60 might have a dangerously low ingestion of vitamins, but they still get to be seventy, eighty and ninety years old. Some might even get to be a hundred. Imagine these same 60-plussers to get enough vitamins. How old would they become? And how healthy could they still be?

I can see myself going to the gym on my hundredth birthday and do twenty bench presses of a hundred kilos. Effortless. No problem for a young man, but quite an achievement for a man who has just rounded of his first century. I can picture it all: The assembled press is astounded.
“How do you manage this, professor Koert?” a gorgeous young female reporter of the Dutch national television NOS stammers. Because, by then, I would have surely become a professor.
“Years ago, I started taking Vit & Mineral ProElite, my dear child,” I would reply. “A very solid vitamin pill, without much ado, but of excellent quality. You see the result before you.”
And from the pocket of my BdM-hoody I take the jar that I happen to have on me.
“Great design,”  the reporter says, “very elegant.”
“Would you like to have it?”
She blushes fiercely. “This is the best day of my life,” she whispers. “I get a supplement from no one less than W....”
“I'll sign it for you.” I say.

Sigh. Where was I? Ah, well. At what could happen when you prevent vitamin deficiencies. Tests do not answer this adequately. There have been trials in which older people get multivitamins and then score a little higher in mental testings or get somewhat stronger bones. These are subtle effects though. The pensioners do not throw their walkers out the window and run out of their nursing homes.
This is probably because it is not easy for some vitamins to replenish deficiencies that have already occurred, especially not with the elderly. With vitamin E, beta carotene and vitamin C you can pull this of, but once you have a deficiency of vitamins like B12 or D it is difficult. It is much better to prevent such a deficiency and start to build a healthy level of vitamins early.

That is why I have my jar of multivitamins ready. Shall I sign it now?

J Nutr Health Aging. 2011 Feb;15(2):99-103; Nutr J. 2007 May 2;6:10; Eur J Clin Nutr. 2009 Apr;63(4):558-65; Int J Vitam Nutr Res. 2004 Mar;74(2):161-8; J Am Med Dir Assoc. 2008 Mar;9(3):162-7; Int J Food Sci Nutr. 2011 Jun;62(4):318-27.

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