Multivitamins have sparked a fierce scientific debate over whether nutritional supplements are good for our health or costing billions of dollars.
A long-term randomized controlled trial in the United States has now produced some of the strongest evidence yet that nutritional supplements can slow aging.
“A lot of people take multivitamins but don’t necessarily know what the benefits of taking it are, so the more we know about its potential health benefits, the better,” said Howard Sesso, an epidemiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital.
When it comes to vitamins, there are seriously conflicting data on health and longevity. There are more than 100,000 vitamins and dietary supplements available for purchase in the United States, and while previous research has shown that supplements generally don’t help you live longer, multivitamins may be beneficial to the health of older adults.
The new study, led by researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, has now rigorously analyzed two supplements to determine whether they can directly slow down the biological aging process.
These include an extensive multivitamin-multimineral (MVM) and 500 mg of cocoa flavanols.
The study analyzed data from nearly 1,000 participants in the Cocoa Supplements and Multivitamin Outcomes Study (COSMOS), whose average age was about 70 years old. Participants who took a daily multivitamin for two years aged more slowly than those who took a placebo, according to two biological aging clocks.
Cocoa extract, meanwhile, had no effect on any of the five “age” clocks the researchers considered, despite being linked to health benefits in other studies.
Sesso and colleagues say the results of their multivitamin study are “encouraging.” But they acknowledge that larger sample sizes and longer trials are needed to determine whether these supplements ultimately translate into meaningful clinical benefits.
Notably, however, participants who took a multivitamin also showed benefits on inflammation and cognitive function.
“In COSMOS, we are fortunate and excited to be able to leverage a rich resource of biomarker data to test how two interventions can improve biological aging and reduce age-related clinical outcomes,” said Sesso.
To date, only a few small, randomized controlled trials have examined the effects of vitamins on epigenetic aging, and many have focused on single vitamins rather than broad approaches.
Epigenetic aging clocks are inherently imperfect because they rely on correlation and prediction, but they have recently become a powerful way to estimate how quickly or slowly a person is biologically aging relative to their chronological age.
These clocks predict how the aging process will unfold by analyzing DNA patterns in the blood. Interfering with some of these biomarkers has the potential to slow down the aging process, and multivitamins may be one way to achieve this goal.
“Today, there is a lot of interest in finding ways to not only live longer, but to live better,” Seso said.
“It is exciting to see the benefits of multivitamins associated with biological markers of aging. This study opens the door to learning more about available, safe interventions that contribute to healthier, higher-quality aging.”
In the current trial, the two epigenetic clocks associated with multivitamin use were PCPhenoAge and PCGrimAge. These second-generation models stand out from previous studies and correlate with a range of health and longevity indicators.
Ultimately, taking a daily multivitamin over two years was associated with a decrease of 0.113 years per year on the PCGrimAge clock and 0.214 years per year on the PCPhenoAge clock. Based on associations shown in previous studies, the observed clock changes may correspond to a reduction in cancer risk over 10 years, on the order of 3% to 7%.
Participants who showed accelerated aging on these clocks forward The test was particularly affected by multivitamins. On the PCGrimAge clock, participants aged nearly twice as fast as baseline normal aging individuals. This suggests that multivitamins may improve health outcomes by compensating for nutritional deficiencies.
Related: 5 Things You Should Know Before Buying Supplements
“Considering that extending healthy lifespan by one year could potentially save the U.S. population $38 trillion, our findings suggest that daily MVM could be a highly cost-effective and easy-to-use intervention to improve public health,” the team concluded.
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Some of the study authors received funding from private companies with financial interests in the nutritional supplement field, but their study was independently conducted, peer-reviewed, and relied on a trial funded primarily by the National Institutes of Health.
in the corresponding fragment natureCalen Ryan and Daniel Belsky, two epigenetic researchers who were not involved in the current study, called the findings “a major advance in the supplement field.”
“However,” they added, “whether such interventions can extend healthy lifespan remains an open question.”
The study was published in natural medicine.
