Using the Better Eye Health Protocol: Liquid Vitamins

TRANSCRIPT FOR BEH PODCAST EPISODE 6

Dr. Miller:  I just want to talk about the different supplements we use in our basic protocol. We won’t talk about them all today; we’ll do a little talk on each one over the next few weeks.  This leads into one question, where somebody was asking about the AREDS formula.  AREDS is an acronym, it’s a term that refers to the program of supplements that ophthalmologists recommend and it stands for Age Related Eye Disease Study. 

For a number of reasons, I am not really fond of the AREDS formulas.  Almost the entire study was funded by the Bausch and Lomb company, who had bought a brand name vitamin called Ocuvite. Ocuvite came on the market in the 1960’s when there was some research, originally out of Israel that people with macular degeneration tended to be low in zinc.  The other kind of research found that giving some zinc supplementation to people with degenerative eye diseases, especially macular degeneration, seemed to be useful in slowing the progress of the disease. 

And so, Ocuvite was a so, so multivitamin with extra zinc. There was a lot of extra Zinc in Ocuvite.  Patient’s doctors would tell them what doctors tell people now: “there’s really nothing you can do, but here take these vitamins”.  Doctors would hand out samples of it and people would take the multivitamin very diligently.  There was almost 90 mg of Zinc in the Ocuvite back in the 60’s.  After many years of diligently taking the vitamin, their eye doctor had told them to take, people found out, that too much zinc gives you heart failure by damaging your heart.  This damage is mainly because zinc displaces Copper and Manganese and other critical elements.  So a lot of people started showing up in emergency rooms in the 70’s with heart failure, and they  traced it back to their years of taking Ocuvite. That’s why you don’t want to overdo the Zinc, or if you do overdo the Zinc, you need to make sure you’re taking extra Copper and Manganese.

Ocuvite was kind of the brand name for eye disease vitamins and Bausch and Lomb, when they bought the brand, wanted to be able to market it for eye disease, which meant they had to do some studies.  They finally funded this thing called the ARED Study, which a lot of people jokingly call the Ocuvite study. What’s interesting is one of the things about the formula they studied.  First of all, it had higher levels of a lot of vitamins than what most doctors were used to prescribing.  So it had amounts of vitamin E and vitamin C and Zinc and other things that were well over what the minimum daily requirement or the even the recommended daily allowance.  They were far beyond what the minimum was that’s usually recommended.  As a result, one of the things the ARED Study did is proved that larger doses of vitamins are safe because nobody got into trouble with the AREDS. 

The other thing that it did is showed that even a poorly designed, if taken regularly did slow the progression of the disease of macular degeneration.  That’s exactly what it sounds like, it slowed the progression.  Nobody got better, nobody’s deterioration stopped, but people didn’t get as bad as quickly. 

So, AREDS is a standard thing that’s recommended now.  I don’t like the AREDS because, in general, the ones on the market aren’t very good.  If you go back and actually read the ARED Study, what they used in the studies was a far superior product to what is actually marketed as AREDS vitamins. In other words, the stuff on the shelves that you go buy isn’t nearly as good as what they used in the study.  So, it’s hard to even compare results there because they were using a custom formulated thing for research and it’s not what ended up being put in the bottles that are on the shelf.  And I think you can do much better.

Having talked about the AREDS, I just want to say that the next thing we’ll talk about this week are the liquid multivitamins.  The reason we use a liquid multivitamin or the reason we recommend one, is that liquids are far better absorbed.  The protocol brand that we use is labeled as a liquid multivitamin and mineral supplement.  In truth, with any kind of vitamin mineral supplement, there are  generally very inadequate amounts of minerals, but when you mix vitamins and minerals in the same preparation, you tend to see the minerals get bound up to the fat soluble vitamins. These vitamins are, vitamin A, vitamin D, vitamin E and vitamin K.  You really get very little of the minerals out of something like that. 

Manufacturers do that because people like having a one product thing, everything together in one product whether it’s pills or liquid.  But there are some best practices that are recommended for manufactured vitamins and those practices say don’t mix vitamins and minerals in the same product.  There’s no harm in having the minerals there, but there is a separate mineral supplement we recommend and we’ll talk about that next week. 

Coming back to the vitamins we use, the brand in our protocol has worked well, both with eye disease and other things that I treat.  The amounts of things are not too high and the form of vitamin A that they use has some beta-keratin in there, but then the other vitamin A is in the form of vitamin A palmitate.  We’ll talk more on that a little later.

There’s been some research, and a lot of confusion, about the use of vitamin A for anybody with an eye disease, especially Stargardt Disease.  But a lot of that data is, I believe, misinterpreted, so we’re writing more about that.  There’s going to be some things that we’re going to put out in writing so you can read it because it’s a complex discussion.  However, I don’t recommend that people with Stargardt Disease or any other eye disease completely avoid vitamin A.  Some doctors get so radical that they say: “not only don’t take supplements with vitamin A, but don’t eat fruits and vegetables, and the thing that makes the vitamin A dangerous is light, so don’t go out in the light”.  So now you’re sitting eating potatoes in the dark and it’s not a good bit of advice for health.  There is work showing ways to go with this, but I do like the liquid multi-vitamins.  They have everything in them, in some cases more than what’s in the ARED Study.  I think they’re a far better absorbing product and higher quality.  That’s why we go with the protocol liquid multivitamins. It has your basic B vitamins. it’s got antioxidants and that’s the basic vitamin formula that we use.