Your Vitamins are Obsolete: The Vitamer Revolution – by Dr. Sheldon Zablow

First, what this is not:a book to tell you “throw out your vitamins and just eat these foods”.

This book focuses mainly on two vitamins in which deficiencies are common especially as we get older: B9 and B12.

So, what does the title mean? It’s not so much that your vitamins are obsolete—that would imply that they were more useful previously, which is not the case. Rather, the most common forms of vitamins B9 and B12 provided in supplements are folic acid and cyanocobalamin, respectively, which as he demonstrates with extensive research to back up his claims, cannot be easily absorbed or used especially well.

About those vitamers: a vitamer is simply a form of a vitamin—most vitamins we need can arrive in a variety of forms. In the case of vitamins B9 and B12, he advocates for ditching vitamers folic acid and cyanocobalamin, cheap as they are, and springing for bioactive vitamers L-methylfolate, methylcobalamin, and adenosylcobalamin.

He also discusses (again, just as well-evidenced as the above things) why we might struggle to get enough from our diet after a certain age. For example, if trying to get these vitamins from meat, 50% of people over 50 cannot manufacture enough stomach acid to break down that protein to release the vitamins.

And as for methyl-B12 vitamers, you might expect you can get those from meat, and technically you can, but they don’t occur in all animals, just in one kind of animal. Specifically, the kind that has the largest brain-to-body ratio. However, eating the meat of this animal can result in protein folding errors in general and Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease in particular, so the author does not recommend eating humans, however nutritionally convenient that would be.

All this means that supplementation after a certain age really can be a sensible way to do it—but do it wisely, and pick the right vitamers.

The style of the book is informationally dense, but very readable even for a layperson provided one starts at the beginning and reads forwards, as otherwise one will find oneself in a mire of terms whose explanations one missed when they were first introduced.

Bottom line: if you are over 50 and/or have any known or suspected issues with vitamins B9 and/or B12, this book becomes very important reading.

Click here to check out Your Vitamins Are Obsolete, and get your body what it needs!