Multivitamin or Not?

Bruce Ames, professor, nutrition and aging researcher at UC Berkley developed the triage theory. He believes that our body will select nutrient use for life today in exchange for disease prevention tomorrow. Ames has published over 450 scientific papers and considers this his most important work.

Triage – from the French word trier meaning to sort, separate, or select – works on the battlefield by military doctors prioritizing treatments depending on the probable survival of the wounded.
Professor Ames’ theory works in much the same way: By appreciating that natural selection favors short-term survival over the long-term, Prof Ames’ hypothesized that our short-term survival is achieved by prioritizing the allocation of scarce micro nutrients. In other words, to stop us falling over from a lack of iron in the heart, for example, iron is pulled from non-essential sources.
The triage theory is a way of “measuring the insidious damage going on over time”, he said.
The theory was first proposed in 2006 (PNAS, Vol. 103, Pages 17589-94) to explain why age-related diseases like heart disease, cancer, and dementia may be unintended consequences of mechanisms developed during evolution to protect against episodic vitamin/mineral shortages.

“If this hypothesis is correct, micro nutrient deficiencies that trigger the triage response would accelerate cancer, aging, and neural decay but would leave critical metabolic functions, such as ATP production, intact,” explained Professor Ames in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

TAKE HOME MESSAGE
Eat a well balanced, vegetable rich diet and take a good multivitamin/mineral.

To learn more about Dr. Ames go to:
http://mcb.berkeley.edu/index.php?option=com_mcbfaculty&name=amesb


Bruce Ames, Ph.D., professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and senior research scientist at Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute.