If you eat foods that contain lots of magnesium, betacarotene and vitamins C and E it’ll help protect your hearing. American and South Korean epidemiologists, who studied over 2500 Americans aged between 20 and 69, state in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition that people who consume large amounts of these nutrients have less noise induced hearing loss.
If you eat foods that contain lots of magnesium, betacarotene and vitamins C and E it’ll help protect your hearing. American and South Korean epidemiologists, who studied over 2500 Americans aged between 20 and 69, state in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition that people who consume large amounts of these nutrients have less noise induced hearing loss.
Damage to our hearing occurs as a result of repeated exposure to noise. Animal studies have already shown that supplementation with magnesium, betacarotene and the antioxidants vitamin C and vitamin E offers protection against this. [Free Radic Biol Med. 2007 May 1;42(9):1454-63.] The researchers in this study looked at whether the relationship between these nutrients and quality of hearing could also be found in data collected by the National Center for Health Statistics.
The researchers used data on a group of 2592 Americans that had been collected between 2001 and 2004. Researchers had measured the participants’ hearing ability in hearing tests, and used questionnaires to work out how much magnesium, betacarotene and vitamins C and E the respondents consumed through their food and supplements.
And hey presto: the respondents with the highest intake of magnesium, betacarotene, vitamin C and vitamin E had the least chance of hearing damage. The figure below shows the relationship between the intake of each of the four nutrients and the likelihood of hearing damage.
Q1 = the likelihood of hearing damage in the 25 percent of the participants with the lowest nutrient intake; Q4 = the likelihood of hearing damage in the 25 percent of the participants with the highest nutrient intake.
The figure above shows that the relationship between good hearing and a high intake of vitamins C and E was statistically significant.
The researchers also calculated a total score for all participants, based on their betacarotene, vitamin C and vitamin E intake [AC2]. The relationship between the total score and hearing quality was even stronger than the relationship between the individual nutrients and hearing.
To find out how much magnesium, betacarotene, vitamin C and vitamin E you should take daily according to this study to protect your hearing, look at Quartile 4 in the table below.
The second author of this study, Josef Miller, was also involved in an animal study published in 2007 that showed the effectiveness of a mix of these nutrients against damage to hearing. Together with colleagues, he filed a patent for nutritional supplements containing magnesium, betacarotene, vitamin C and vitamin C that are intended to protect hearing.
Antioxidant vitamins and magnesium and the risk of hearing loss in the US general population.
Choi YH, Miller JM, Tucker KL, Hu H, Park SK.
Abstract
BACKGROUND:
The protective effects of antioxidant vitamins on hearing loss are well established in animal studies but in few human studies. Recent animal studies suggest that magnesium intake along with antioxidants may act in synergy to prevent hearing loss.
OBJECTIVE:
We examined associations between intake of antioxidant vitamins (daily ?-carotene and vitamins C and E) and magnesium and hearing thresholds and explored their joint effects in US adults.
DESIGN:
We analyzed cross-sectional data from 2592 participants aged 20-69 y from NHANES 2001-2004. Hearing thresholds as pure tone averages (PTAs) at speech (0.5, 1, 2, and 4 kHz) and high frequencies (3, 4, and 6 kHz) were computed.
RESULTS:
When examined individually, modeled as quartiles, and after adjustment for potential confounders, higher intakes of ?-carotene, vitamin C, and magnesium were associated with lower (better) PTAs at both speech and high frequencies. High intakes of ?-carotene or vitamin C combined with high magnesium compared with low intakes of both nutrients were significantly associated with lower (better) PTAs at high frequencies (-14.82%; 95% CI: -20.50% to -8.74% for ?-carotene + magnesium and -10.72%; 95% CI: -16.57% to -4.45% for vitamin C + magnesium). The estimated joint effects were borderline significantly larger than the sums of the individual effects [high ?-carotene/low magnesium (-4.98%) and low ?-carotene/high magnesium (-0.80%), P-interaction = 0.08; high vitamin C/low magnesium (-1.33%) and low vitamin C/high magnesium (2.13%), P-interaction = 0.09].
CONCLUSION:
Dietary intakes of antioxidants and magnesium are associated with lower risks of hearing loss.
PMID: 24196403 [PubMed – in process]
Source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24196403
