Anti-Aging Nutritional Supplements
Anti-Aging Supplements - Introduction
Supplementing your diet with vitamins, minerals and herbs will significantly increase your life span. These agents to date cannot replace proper nutrition, but aid a healthy life extension. Not all nutrients are anti-aging supplements. Anti-aging supplements address and prevent any possible deterioration in the cells that may accelerate the aging process.
The fact that supplements could aid in the prevention of certain disease has not always been known. Between 1500 B.C and 1900 A.D, it was observed that certain foods prevented some diseases. Egyptians used liver to ward off night blindness. From 1890 to 1900 the relationship between the lack of certain foods and disease became established. For instance, it was determined that polished rice (which lacks thiamine) caused beriberi. The years 1900-1948 were known as the golden age of vitamin discovery. Many techniques for perfecting the production of vitamins, such as isolation and synthesis, were pioneered. In 1933, the first commercial synthesis of Vitamin C occurred.
Until recently many fallacies existed about vitamins and minerals. The following are three such basic misconceptions. Firstly, vitamins are catalysts and being catalysts, they can be recycled almost indefinitely and are therefore needed only in very small doses. Secondly, not only are large doses not needed, they are dangerous. Thirdly, vitamins are needed only to prevent deficiency diseases, as in Vitamin C for scurvy and nicotinic acid for pellagra.
In fact, optimum doses of vitamins are necessary for both prevention of disease and optimum health. What constitutes optimum varies from very small to very large depending on various conditions. Take nicotinic acid as an example. Only10 mg are needed to prevent pellagra, but 1000 mg are needed to prevent recurring chronic pellagra. Furthermore, there is no one optimum dose for everyone in the population. The size of the dose depends on age, sex, type of illness, and type of stressors. Further, we have recently discovered that vitamins also have important anti-aging activities which appear to be unrelated to their properties as vitamins.
