One Pill a Day

Most of your dietary woes are soothed if every day you eat at least eight servings of fresh fruits and vegetables, six servings of whole grains, three glasses of calcium-rich milk or soy milk, and two servings of extra-lean chicken, fish or legumes. Sounds reasonable, but there’s a catch – finding anyone who does that is about as likely as trying to find someone who can walk on water.

The irony is most of us think we’re eating pretty well. A Gallop poll conducted by the American Dietetic Association found that 90% of women surveyed said their diets were healthful. Most of them are delusional, since every national nutrition survey dating from the 1960s to the present repeatedly and consistently finds that most Americans don’t come close to adequate, let alone optimal. Only one in every 100 people meet even minimum standards of the proverbial “balanced diet”.

Even if you are perfectly, no diet can realistically provide optimal amounts of certain nutrients. Take, for example,

Vitamin E. You need at least 100 IU of this vitamin daily to cut the risk for memory loss and possibly Alzheimer’s. Are you willing to eat 8 cups of almonds, ¾ cup safflower oil or 62 cups of fresh spinach every day to meet this need?

Calcium. This mineral might help soothe the grumps in women seized with PMS. In fact, as calcium intake goes up, so does mood for these women. The latest calcium recommendation to curb that bad mood is 1,000 to 1,200 milligrams daily, which is easy enough if you drink four glasses of milk or soy milk daily. For those people who shun milk, meeting this quota means consuming 6 ounces of tofu, a can of salmon with the bones, and 2 cups of black bean soup every day.

Folic acid. This B vitamin is critical to mood and memory, but even though white flour an all the junk food made from it are now fortified with folic acid, intakes still fall short for a huge section of the population. You need at least two servings every day of foods rich in folate, like greens. But when researchers at the University of California, Berkeley investigated women’s intake of dark green leafies, they found almost 9 out of 10 women failed to include even one serving on any one of four days!

Vitamin D. frankly, I don’t know where anyone gets enough of this vitamin, since even drinking four glasses of fortified milk or soy milk daily won’t meet current needs for most people, and the amount of time you must spend in direct overhead sun without sunscreen is totally unrealistic, especially in the winter. Yet not getting enough of this vitamin is a big mistake if you battle mood, memory or possibly even weight issues.

Happy, fit people know that to improve their moods, sharpen their minds, life energy and fill in nutritional gaps while dieting, it’s a smart idea to take a moderate-dose, balanced multivitamin and mineral supplement. There is even evidence that a moderate dose multivitamin can lessen depression, improve mood, reduce stress and anxiety and soothe troubled emotions.

This makes sense since most vitamins and minerals are assembly-line workers in the brain. For example, the B vitamins covert glucose into energy for the brain and also help build some of the nerve chemicals that then tell you to cry at a sad place in a book or laugh at the right spot in a movie. Vitamin D protects nerves in the brain from degenerating. Vitamin E protects brain cell membranes from aging. Iron ensures your brain gets enough oxygen. Iodine ensures normal brain metabolism. The list goes on and on.