Sheldon Zablow

Sheldon Zablow (Col ’73, Med ’77), a psychiatrist, published a nutrition book, Your Vitamins Are Obsolete:The Vitamer Revolution—A Program for Healthy Living and Healthy Longevity. This book is about the disparity between what we expect of our vitamins and what they provide. Food often has its natural bioactive vitamins (vitamers) stripped out while the synthetic forms are substituted back in. This vitamer deficiency is exacerbating the universal illness of chronic inflammation which contributes to the onset of depression, dementia, diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular disease, etc. The book explains the newly understood mechanism by which this occurs by focusing on the two most essential vitamins—B12 and folate. Vitamers are the forms of vitamins that are used by cells and are critical to the functioning of biochemical activity from the expression of genes to the production of energy molecules to the cleansing of cellular waste. For example, if there is plenty of Vitamin D and calcium but a deficiency of B vitamers, osteoporosis still occurs. The unhealthy pro-inflammatory mechanism explored is the relationship between the deficiency of the vitamer forms of B12 and folate and reduced DNA epigenetic methylation. I call this process the Vitamer Revolution.