Do B Vitamins Help Memory?
Every now and then another article on B vitamins is published. For example, researchers from the Oxford Project to Investigate Memory and Aging (OPTIMA) recently found that the mild memory problems suffered by healthy people stop getting worse when they take a memory supplement with B vitamins. Moreover, the brains of those who take the B-vitamin supplement appear to shrink at a significant lower rate than those in the placebo group. These types of results have caused a flood of articles on the B vitamin family, and their stardom has resulted in a tsunami of companies offering memory supplements with the vitamins as the main ingredient. But some companies got, let’s say, a little bit too excited and overestimated the effects of B vitamins in their advertisements. In this post I will focus on the scientific evidence for the effects of B vitamins. There are more than twenty different types of B vitamins, but who is who in the zoo? For memory, the main ones are B6 (pyridoxide), B9 (folic
