Lucinda's Pearls: Advance MN
Lucinda Harms is the director of pharmacy at CarePro Advance Health and CarePro Compounding.
Advance MN is a multi-nutritional that is ranked by Nutrisearch as a 3.5 out of 5. It retails for about $1 per day. A full dose is 6 tablets per day and it can be divided up 2 tablets 3 times daily or 3 tablets twice daily. The B vitamins may be stimulating for some people so it’s a good idea to not take the pm dose too close to bedtime, especially if insomnia is a problem. A nice benefit to having a full dose consist of 6 tablets daily is that we can customize the dose by having someone take as little as 1/6th of the full daily dose (1 tablet) at a time. This might be helpful in someone who doesn’t require or tolerate the full dose. To address concerns about having to take 6 tablets daily, remember that there is a correlation between the number of tablets or capsules in the serving size and the quality of the product according to the Nutrisearch rankings. This is because the number of tablets/capsules are a reflection of the amounts of the nutrients per serving.
We typically recommend 200-300% of the RDA (recommended dietary intake) in a good quality multi-nutritional. Many of the ingredients in Advance MN meet this recommendation. It is important to understand how the Food and Nutrition Board of the Institute of Medicine arrives at the RDA. The RDAs are based on the levels of nutrient intake that are needed to prevent deficiencies. As such, they represent what Carlton Fredericks called “minimum daily requirements for minimum daily health.” They were not designed to address the possibility that higher levels of nutrient intake can help prevent chronic diseases and enhance overall well-being. The RDAs are defined as the average daily dietary nutrient intake level sufficient to meet the nutrient requirement of nearly all (97-98%) healthy individuals in a particular life stage and gender group. The assumption that most people whose nutrient intakes meet the RDAs do not need and cannot benefit from, nutritional supplements appears to be incorrect, for a number of reasons. RDAs are usually calculated by studying a relatively small number of healthy individuals and setting the recommended intake level at 2 standard deviations above the average requirement. It is implied, when using this assumption, that human nutrient requirements follow a bell-shaped curve. It is likely that, for any particular nutrient, the majority of people do fall on the bell-shaped curve but a substantial minority have requirements that are far from average. The probability that a person consuming the RDA for 40 essential nutrients would be meeting his or her needs for all of these nutrients is only 36%.
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