[Rhonda]: So the RDA, you're saying, is set on preventing acute deficiencies.
[Bruce]: Yeah.
So the two numbers that the committees come up with, one is the EAR, estimated average
requirement, and that's some distribution in the population of the vitamin or the mineral.
And the other is the RDA, which is set at two standard deviations above that.
That's for the population.
So if you're below the EAR, that's the definition of you're not getting enough.
And it's not a pretty picture because Americans are eating all these empty calories.
[Rhonda]: Right.
Wait.
So let me interrupt.
So the EAR is actually set two standard deviations lower than the RDA, and people still aren't
even meeting that?
So, and that's what, you know, National Health Statistics, they use the EAR to determine
whether or not populations are getting enough of certain vitamins and minerals.
[Bruce]: Right.
But it's all based on short-term.
For vitamin D, they based it on a short-term effect, which is calcium.
So...
[Rhonda]: So the question is, then, how do we know if we're getting enough vitamin K,
if we're getting enough, you know, of the vitamin A, vitamin D, B vitamins?
You know, how do we know we're getting enough of these to prevent the long-term diseases
of aging, right?
[Bruce]: Well, we don't really.
But the committees usually put in a safety factor.
But it could be too much or too little.
So what you wanna know is does it shorten your life?
And you could do that in mice, and do those kinds of questions.
But those are expensive to do, and nobody's been really doing them.
Anyway, I'm writing a theoretical paper why there are lots of things out there that we
probably should be calling vitamins that are more long-term things.
[Rhonda]: Do these committees determine RDAs only based on things that can kill you?
Or do they determine...like for example, lutein and zeaxanthin, they're most certainly preventing,
you know, age-related macular degeneration.
So, you know, is it just because it's something that happens later in life that...
[Bruce]: Well, practically no attention has been paid to that kind of thing.
And the definition of a vitamin is you don't give it to a mouse and it dies.
Sort of...
[Rhonda]: So it is basically based on survival.
[Bruce]: ...it's a very short-term supplement.
I wanna say there should be these longevity vitamins, maybe an antioxidant like some of
these carotenoids or other things, that are giving you a long lifespan.
[Rhonda]: Right.
So the other question I guess would be then, can we, as scientists, devise certain biomarkers
then that we can measure, right now, you know, as a biomarker of something that is a disease
of aging?
[Bruce]: Yeah.
That's something we're thinking about all the time.
I think the future is preventive medicine will have a lot to do with nutrition.
Because these 30 micronutrients they're also called, the vitamins and the minerals, and
I think there can be another couple or dozen that are helping us live a long lifespan,
those compounds, we wanna know how much we should be getting from our diet.
Most of it is nutritional.
And in the future, all of this is gonna come within 10 years I think.
You put your finger in a machine, and already there's a company in Boulder that can measure
1500 proteins in a finger prick of blood.
And so we're gonna find which is the vulnerable protein that indicates that you're magnesium-deficient,
and that's half the country, and tell you, "Hey, you're magnesium-deficient."
That's what Rhonda is trying to prove experimentally right now, but nobody's proven it yet, that
what you do when you're short of magnesium, because of triage, you eliminate one of the
DNA repair enzymes and put the magnesium in some more essential protein.
[Rhonda]: Yeah.
Well, you need magnesium to make and utilize ATP.
That would be the essential function.
[Bruce]: Yeah.
So every DNA repair enzyme requires magnesium, and some of them may be the things that go
first.
Anyway, we're trying to determine what's the vulnerable protein when you start getting
low.
But you don't wanna get low to the point of disease.
You wanna get low to prevent some insidious damage that leads to aging.
So I think when you eat a bad diet, you're accelerating your aging in some way or another.