摘要：维生素和矿物质的严重缺乏在发达国家相对罕见，而中度缺乏非常普遍，且往往不被重视。一项新研究或可会使人们改变这种想法，因为其研究了中度硒和维生素K缺乏随着时间而积累的损伤，结果发现维生素和矿物质缺乏导致了年龄相关性疾病。
“了解如何更好地界定和衡量最佳营养，将会形成新技术让每个人来优化自己的营养，比今天更具现实可能性。”该项研究的作者之一、加州奥克兰儿童医院奥克兰研究所的营养与代谢中心的Joyce C. McCann博士说，“如果这一关于硒和维生素K的理论的原理可推广到其他维生素和矿物质，该项研究则或可为其提供基础。”
McCann和同事通过编译和评估几种一般类型的科学证据得出了他们的结论。他们测试在进化角度上必需的硒依赖蛋白是否比那些非必需的硒依赖蛋白对那些硒缺乏症更具抵抗力。他们发现在细胞和组织水平的一种高度复杂的机制显示，当硒有限时，机体会保护那些必需的硒依赖蛋白而损失那些非必需的硒依赖蛋白。他们还发现，硒依赖蛋白的中度缺乏可导致年龄相关性疾病的共有特征，这些疾病包括癌症、心脏病、脑和免疫功能丧失。结果提示，应试图聚焦于进化角度非必需的维生素和矿物质依赖蛋白，试图找出维生素或矿物质缺乏症与年龄相关性疾病之间的机理联系。这种机理联系或可在疾病治疗中被证实。
“这篇论文应该解决关于每天服用好的、完整的、多种维生素的重要性的任何争论，”《FASEB》杂志主编Gerald Weissmann博士说。“正如这份报告显示，我们刚刚开始明白了服用包含硒的多种维生素是一种防止维生素和矿物质缺乏的好方法，而维生素和矿物质缺乏随着时间的推移可能会导致各种损害。”
生物探索推荐英文原文
How Vitamins and Minerals May Prevent Age-Related Diseases
Severe deficiency of the vitamins and minerals required for life is relatively uncommon in developed nations, but modest deficiency is very common and often not taken seriously. A new research published online in the FASEB Journal, however, may change this thinking as it examines moderate selenium and vitamin K deficiency to show how damage accumulates over time as a result of vitamin and mineral loss, leading to age-related diseases.
"Understanding how best to define and measure optimum nutrition will make the application of new technologies to allow each person to optimize their own nutrition a much more realistic possibility than it is today." said Joyce C. McCann, Ph.D., a co-author of the study from the Nutrition and Metabolism Center at Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute in Oakland, California. "If the principles of the theory, as demonstrated for vitamin K and selenium, can be generalized to other vitamins and minerals, this may provide the foundation needed."
McCann and colleagues reached their conclusions by compiling and assessing several general types of scientific evidence. They tested whether selenium-dependent proteins that are essential from an evolutionary perspective are more resistant to selenium deficiency than those that are less essential. They discovered a highly sophisticated array of mechanisms at cellular and tissue levels that, when selenium is limited, protect essential selenium-dependent proteins at the expense of those that are nonessential. They also found that mutations in selenium-dependent proteins that are lost on modest selenium deficiency result in characteristics shared by age-related diseases including cancer, heart disease, and loss of immune or brain function. Results should inform attempts to locate mechanistic linkages between vitamin or mineral deficiencies and age-related diseases by focusing attention on the vitamin and mineral-dependent proteins that are nonessential from an evolutionary perspective. Such mechanistic linkages are likely to present opportunities for treatment.
"This paper should settle any debate about the importance of taking a good, complete, multivitamin every day," said Gerald Weissmann, M.D., Editor-in-Chief of the FASEB Journal. "As this report shows, taking a multivitamin that contains selenium is a good way to prevent deficiencies that, over time, can cause harm in ways that we are just beginning to understand."
