YOU: The Most Important Choices For Making Yourself Younger: #5-10 DHA, ½ A Multi Twice A Day, Vitamin D, Calcium And Magnesium, And Aspirin
By Dr. Michael F. Roizen
Co-Author of 4 #1 NY Times Bestsellers including: YOU Staying Young. The Owner’s Manual For Extending Your Warranty (Free Press) and YOU: The Owner’s Manual. An Insider’s Guide to Your Body That Will Make You Healthier and Younger (Harper Collins)
Our basic premise is that your body is amazing: You get a do over: it doesn’t take that long, and isn’t that hard if you know what to do. In these notes we give you a short course in what to do so it becomes easy for you and then to teach others. We want you to know how much control you have over your quality and length of life
Last month (you did read and memorize all our columns, haven’t you?) we came to the conclusion that the most important tips to Staying Young are:
1. Understand you get a do over and it’s not that hard and it doesn’t take that long if you know what to do.
2. Start with walking.
3. Recruit a buddy and call daily.
4. Learn how to make YOU-turns
Now we want to add six more:
5-10, Pop these Pills: 5, one half a multivitamin morning and night; 6, vitamin D 500 IU, 7, Calcium 600mg, and 8, magnesium 200mg, morning and night; 9, DHA –omegaa-3 600mg a day; 10, 162.5 mg of aspirin.
The ½ of a multivitamin morning and evening? You pee out the water soluble ones in 8 to 16 hours so you need it twice a day. Since only 160,000 of the over 23 million people who have taken the full nutrition program at RealAge (it’s free at RealAge.com) get the right amount of vitamins and minerals from diet, we believe in taking half a multi twice a day as an insurance policy against a less than perfect diet. As to the specific ones, D, calcium and magnesium: 50 to 87% of Americans are short of vitamin D in published studies—and you need it to help fight cancer (see below), to keep arteries young, and to aid brain function. So make sure you get it measured and take what is needed to keep its level normal. Also vitamin D3 is essential for calcium absorption and incorporation into bone.
When you think about it, much of what we do and use for our health really boils down to protection: helmets to protect us from an accidental brain smoosh, running shoes to protect us from shards of glass, aspirin to protect us from cancer and arterial aging, fluoride to protect against cavities, and Trojans to protect us from STDs. Perhaps the greatest protector of all is the one that you can’t buy in any store or order from any online discount warehouse (though there’s an idea): it’s the p53 tumor suppressor gene, which has the job of recognizing when your cells are at risk of developing into cancer and doing what it can to put a stop to it. Its job— that of biological guard dog and computer spell-checker rolled into one mean gene—is to protect your body and you know what is essential to turn on your p 53 gene—it is vitamin d and since 50 to 80 % of us do not get enough to turn on our spell checker, I feel getting adequate amounts of vitamin D in pill form is essential.
We’ll discuss the rational for other “POP YOU PILLs” recommendations , Tips #6-10, next month.
Mehmet and I have a new book released on November 11th, 2008, entitled YOU: Being Beautiful: The Owner’s Manual to Outer and Inner Beauty. Next Month, we will discuss an excerpt from that book and dispel three beauty myths: “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, “Don’t judge a book by its cover”, and that “Beauty is only skin deep”, and tell you why we believe beauty is actually precisely perceived, purposeful, and rooted in hard science more than abstract and random opinion.
Beauty doesn’t as much reflect our vanity as much as it does our humanity and our health. So stay tuned for more tips on Staying Young, and on being more beautiful.
About the author:
Michael F. Roizen, M.D., is a professor of anesthesiology and internal medicine, Chief Wellness Officer, and and chair of the Wellness Institute at the Cleveland Clinic. Dr Roizen can be heard on over 30 radio stations Saturdays from 5 to 7 pm. For a listing just email a request to YouDocs@gmail.com
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