20 years of supplements?

[humke]

Hi Steve,

Reading the show notes of SN-995 I noticed your answer about Vitamin D in the "Closing the Loop" section. This part got my interest:

That research began exactly 20 years ago, shortly before I turned 50 and it turned me into a crazed consumer of dietary supplements. I have no way of knowing whether I would feel as fantastic as I do today if I hadn’t been consuming a wide range of supplemental nutrition for the past 20 years.

I have been taking Vitamin D for a long time now, partly due to listening to your podcast and reading your research on the website. At various points in my life, I have researched other vitamins and minerals and started taking them, either as part of a multivitamin or separately. I never took them for a very long time because I was never quite sure about the long-term effects (either good or bad) and also because there is conflicting research.

However, taking supplements for 20 years is a long time for a human body. If you are willing to share, I am very interested in hearing about your experiences with these other supplements. Which supplements have you been taking over these 20 years, and what effects do you attribute to them (either positive or negative)? It seems that taking multiple supplements over such a long period has not caused symptoms that made you stop taking them.


Thanks and warm regards,
Arjan

 

[Steve]

Hello Arjan,

I happened by here and saw your recent posting. I am unable to hang out here in the forums (much as I would love to) full time since there are only 24 hours in a day and in addition to nutrition, sleep is important, too! <g> But I was unable to pass up this statement of yours:

However, taking supplements for 20 years is a long time for a human body.

The question that occurred to me is: “Is 20 years a long time to be eating food?” I doubt anyone would argue that eating food is useful, no matter how many years it's done. (And, generally speaking, it's something one needs to do throughout life.) In other words, I don't consider supplementing my diet with additional nutrition that provides my body with some additional chemicals that may be lacking — such as various vitamins and minerals — to be something that should be “time limited” for any reason. It's just "food". The notion that these things can only be obtained through a diet of "natural" food has no foundation and I consider that to be nonsense.

For example, there's nothing whatsoever "magical" about vitamin C being bound into an orange. Vitamin C is just a molecule. It's not mysterious. It would be super useful if our livers were producing the same tens of grams per day that nearly all other animals in the kingdom do. But we cannot, and we know why we cannot. It's a mistake. And since I'm not a Gorilla who can spend his entire day foraging for food and eating bananas, I choose to give my body an extra 10 grams of that precious vitamin C molecule every day.

Now, because vitamin C — formally known as ascorbic acid — is an acid with low pH, to prevent digestive upset it's useful to ingest it in a pH-neutral form. Calcium ascorbate is a terrific solution. Its pH is 7.1 (7.0 being neutral) so it's ever-so-slightly alkali and it causes no digestive upset even when taken in larger amounts.

So getting back to your question: I am quite certain that I'll be "eating" calcium ascorbate several times per day for the rest of my life. (The end of which I am hoping and planning to forestall as long as possible!)

 

[humke]

Thank you for providing an answer despite your limited time.

I completely agree with your points, but I believe my phrasing of the 20-year statement could have been clearer. Twenty years is a substantial amount of time, and when you’ve been doing something for that long, any results or experiences gained carry more weight than if the period had only been, say, one year. For this reason, I find it especially interesting to hear about your experiences after two decades of taking supplements. If there were any effects, positive or negative, one would expect them to have become apparent over this time.

That said, since you’re still taking supplements, I suspect your long-term "study" hasn't revealed any significant negative effects. As you mentioned in the show notes of SN-995, it's difficult to know what might have been different if you had made a different decision 20 years ago.

One thing I often notice in discussions about vitamins (and other topics, for that matter) is that someone will say, "this or that is not (scientifically) proven," and then act as if that automatically means "this or that is not working." But that conclusion is unproven as well.

 

[Steve]

Arjan (@humke):

Ah, I see what you mean. I have never expected to see any overt change. Here's the way I think of it: Most of us are aging so slowly, and there may be sufficient day-to-day variation in how we feel due to diet, exercise, sleep, sex, etc. that we cannot accurately "sense" any short term aging. Also, humans are extremely adept at adapting to our circumstances. So we're inherently poor judges of our absolute condition. This means that a sufficiently slow rate of change in our age will typically go unnoticed. It's really only by using longer-term memory and comparing our condition today with "times past" that we can see that we have obviously aged.

Okay... so we cannot directly sense shorter term aging. If we're unable to sense shorter term aging, and if the effect of improved nutrition through supplementation were a reduction in that rate of aging, how would we know? If we cannot sense non-supplemented aging we're not going to be able to sense slower aging due to supplementation. <g>

I guess the thing to appreciate is that humans are able to survive across an extremely wide range of nutrition. And it's also the case that genetic predisposition plays a huge factor. The ancient wrinkled old person who has been smoking two packs a day, yet is still going strong may be an outlier, but there they are nonetheless. So it takes ACUTE nutritional deprivation for actual SYMPTOMS of such deprivation to be manifested. If you take in absolutely NO vitamin C over a long time, "scurvy" eventually occurs. Because C is required for collagen synthesis, old wounds reopen, gums bleed, and there is very likely significant coronary artery damage due to the hydraulic pressure of blood pumping near the individual's heart.

So for me, I'm not looking for any sort of short term change. Nutrition only does that if there's a chronic and acute shortage. What I'm hoping for is that my health will continue as long as possible. And as I said on the podcast, assuming that my health does endure, I'll never know whether it would have even if I'd never consumed a single supplement... but I have studied the topic quiet a lot. I've read extensively, both books and countless scientific articles... and I know why I'm taking all the "stuff" that I am.

 

[CSPea]

Interesting questions @humke, and thank you @Steve for describing so well your pragmatic acceptance of our body's 'nutritional inertia' - so to speak - which (inertia) so often frustrates us as we look eagerly at our bodies for evidence of the 'good' or the 'harm' we're causing to ourselves by taking - or omitting - these supplements.

I've been taking a vitamin D supplement for (what must surely be) years now, influenced largely by your persuasive observations Steve, and by your conversations with Leo on Security Now.

I'd call myself a rationalist, and a would-be scientist , and I like to think I can spot woo-woo pseudo-science from afar. Then add my deep disdain for advocates of evidence-free 'alternative medicines', and you can guess how strongly I really, really wish I could cite some short-term evidence of my own that would solidly correlate my intake of these vitamin D supplements with the relatively rugged good health that I still enjoy, here in my mid-70's!

But - as we've acknowledged above - I can't cite any such short-term evidence so in the meantime I'll roll along in this ironic trade-off, taking the supplements despite my doubts, hoping for more of these long-term benefits that I can't directly observe