Vitamins and Minerals Ma Prevent Age-Related Disease

How Vitamins and Minerals May Prevent Age-Related Diseases

Although severe deficiency of the vitamins and minerals required for leading a healthy daily life is relatively uncommon in developed nations, it is important to recognize a modest deficiency is very common and often not addressed seriously enough.

For example... A new research article published online in the FASEB (Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology) examines moderate selenium & vitamin K deficiency to show how damage accumulates over time as a result of vitamin and mineral loss, leading to age-related diseases.

"Understanding how best to define and measure optimum nutrition will make the application of new technologies to allow each person to optimize their own nutrition a much more realistic possibility than it is today." said researchers from the Nutrition and Metabolism Center at Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute in Oakland, California. "If the principles of the theory, as demonstrated for vitamin K and selenium, can be generalized to other vitamins and minerals, this may provide the foundation needed."

The team of researchers reached their conclusions by compiling and analyzing several general types of scientific evidence. They tested whether selenium-dependent proteins that are essential from an evolutionary perspective are more resistant to selenium deficiency than those that are less essential. They discovered a highly sophisticated array of mechanisms at the cellular and tissue levels that, when selenium is limited, protect essential selenium-dependent proteins at the expense of those that are nonessential. They also found that mutations in selenium-dependent proteins that are lost on modest selenium deficiency result in characteristics shared by age-related diseases including cancer, heart disease, and loss of immune or brain function.

Results should prompt attempts to locate mechanistic links between vitamin or mineral deficiencies and age-related diseases by focusing attention on the vitamin and mineral-dependent proteins that are considered nonessential from an evolutionary perspective. Such mechanistic links are likely to present opportunities for nutrition-based treatment.

"This paper should settle any debate about the importance of taking a good, complete, multivitamin every day," reported in the FASEB Journal article. "As this report shows, taking a multivitamin that contains selenium is a good way to prevent deficiencies that, over time, can cause harm in ways that we are just beginning to understand."

Source:
Adaptive dysfunction of selenoproteins from the perspective of the triage theory: why modest selenium deficiency may increase risk of diseases of aging. The FASEB Journal, 2011;

Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (2011, June 1). "How vitamins and minerals may prevent age-related diseases