Why Age?

Dietary supplements

“Oh Sir! You are old;
Nature in you stands on the very verge
Of her confine.”

William Shakespeare (King Lear)

Dietary supplements: Age-slowing essentials or quackery?

Humanity has always looked to substances outside everyday foods for the enhancement of health and as bulwarks against the physical ravages of time.

Ancient Greek athletes reportedly consumed bull’s testicles in order to acquire the vigour of that powerful, spirited animal. Rome’s charioteers downed doses of boar dung in water to guard them against injury or death in the frequent spills that occurred in the circus maximus. Gladiators, brawny superstars of the arena, were given the ashes of burnt scorpions to pep them up.

I would like a biochemist to investigate the ingestion of testicles and scorpions and disclose whether it is possible that they could survive the cauldron of human digestion and deliver any residual hormone or venomous stimulant to their imbiber.

Somehow, I doubt it.

There has, and always will be, a place in the human psyche that wants to believe in these things. In the disease and misery-laden medieval period in Europe, tonics and potions reached a dizzying zenith and strange infusions of sow’s milk and tinctures of potentially toxic herbs and gold were believed to prolong life and cure diseases, even the plague.

Vitamania

More recently, the discovery of vitamins has provoked a near-hysterical devotion to their healing and anti-ageing properties. It may surprise many that these mysterious substances, essential to life, only arrived in our consciousness in the 20th century.

When legendary South Pole explorers Scott and Amundsen raced to claim the prize at the furthest limits of human exploration in 1912, the then unknown preventative of scurvy was to be a critical factor in the success of one party and the demise of another.

The diaries of Scott and his final companions were later rescued from the tent that became their tomb, only ten miles from a food depot on their struggle back from the Pole. The curious note that Lawrence “Titus” Oates’ Boer War thigh wound had sprung open and bled profusely on the torturous return aroused in many the suspicion that the doomed party were in the throes of scurvy. His wound was over 10 years old; fully healed and thickly scarred until the extremes of man-hauling sledges on the Antarctic plateau took their toll and a deficiency of Vitamin C caused his tissues to fall apart at the weakest point.

The anti-scorbutic measures taken by the British expedition prior to their assault on the Pole were limited to checking their tinned food for taint prior to consumption.

Vitamin C was not to be discovered until two decades later and first isolated by Hungarian Nobel laureate Albert Szent-Gyorgyi in 1935.

Rare seal and Viking jam

By contrast, Amundsen’s Norwegians lunched and dined heartily on undercooked seal (yes, rich in Vitamin C) following the Eskimo example, and took whortleberry preserve with them to slather on their breakfast buckwheat pancakes. Amundsen didn’t know about Vitamin C any more than the Norse longboat raiders who took the same preserve with them on their long sea journeys 1000 years before.

Amundsen and his party beat Scott to the Pole by one month and every member returned to base in rude health. Amundsen even gained a little weight.

This long-winded dissertation on a forgotten incident in world exploration serves to illustrate how recently vitamins have come into our ken and how they still hold a mysterious fascination for us. We attribute them supernatural properties, rely on them to fill the gaps in a patchy diet, and cling to the hope they will ward off ageing.

I don’t take them.

I used to compete in bodybuilding and had the privilege of meeting Arnold Schwarzenegger in his physical prime. I had the temerity to ask him what supplements he took, and was unprepared for his answer:

“Nussink“, he boomed. “Last yeah I take five hunnert pills a day, zis yeah nussink. I feel da same”.

Pills, pills, and more pills

Shocked, I went home to reconsider the strategy that had led me to take so many fad supplements. I was so full of pills I rattled when I walked. Vitamin C powder (ascorbic acid) was new then. I took teaspoonfuls of it. The un-buffered acid upset my stomach and to my horror, my gums bled when I brushed my teeth. Later, I read of the paradox that huge doses of Vitamin C by mouth can cause a deficiency of it!

Sitting down to read labels and compare the levels of vitamins I was taking with the Department of Health’s recommended daily intake I found I was taking 50 to 500 times the dosage. This was the 1970s and 80s era of “mega” vitamin therapy. Like Arnold, I chucked all my vitamins in the bin and have never taken them since.
Unlike Arnold, I didn’t feel the same a year later, I felt better.

I decided to rely on food and whole food supplements like the brewer’s yeast, kelp and wheat germ oil I had always taken to ensure optimal nutrient intake. For over 5 years I have eschewed those as well but eat large quantities of fruit and vegetables, grains and legumes, moderate amounts of nuts and seeds, low-fat dairy, eggs, some chicken, fish and lean meat. Oh, and olive oil. Like Amundsen, I feel in rude health and am the same weight and waist size of 25 years ago.

Nevertheless my psyche is triggered by supplement fads, and a tiny part of me wants to believe in them. Like an appealing and totally unnecessary object I pick up at a market stall then put down and walk away from until it is forgotten, vitamins, minerals and the squillion nano-nutrients marketed to us at every turn become forgotten too, as the next batch rolls out of the biochemistry labs and into our consciousness.

Dirt poor soil?

But what about our depleted soils and our industrial farming methods that produce nutrient-deficient foods? How can anyone hope to get all their nutrients at the supermarket without stocking up on bottles of pills in the health food aisle?

I don’t buy that one.

Soil fertility is region-specific; an apple picked off a tree in one state may be higher in nutrients than another for simple geological reasons. All apples produced on modern farms are not universally nutrient deficient. Farmers pump so much fertilizer onto crops (admittedly in the narrow NPK spectrum) that nutrient run-off into waterways promotes algal blooms and swamps coral reefs with excessive nutrients that threaten their very survival.

Like the bleeding gums caused by too much ascorbic acid, I hear you say. How much Vitamin C is depleted in an apple by modern farming methods? Ten per cent? Fifty per cent? I’ll let the health quacks and the supplement companies’ marketing gurus make that call.

Fifty per cent? OK, then instead of eating three apples a day to get up to 100 milligrams of Vitamin C (more than recommended intake) go ahead and eat six. Besides enough Vitamin C you will get all the extra fibre, antioxidants and micronutrients provided by extra quantities of a whole food that you won’t from taking pills. And perhaps some yet to be discovered.

Coda

Australia’s consumer magazine Choice recently blew the lid off exorbitantly-priced exotic imported “miracle” juices that purport to fight ageing, disease, and even drug addiction. According to the Sydney Morning Herald’s report, these “super juices” retail for up to 85 dollars per litre and include Himalayan goji, Amazonian acai, Tahitian noni, and Asian mangosteen. In the case of goji, which one company touts as “the greatest natural source of antioxidants on the planet”, Choice’s independent analysis of four different brands of the juice found they contained less than 10 per cent of the antioxidants in one delicious red apple.

Bull’s balls, anyone?