I advocate taking a daily multivitamin/mineral, half in the morning and half at night, along with 1,000 IU of vitamin D3 and 1,100 mg of DHA/EPA in algal or fish oil. And folks are beginning to get the message: Around a quarter people ages 20 to 39 and 40% of those over 60 now take a multivitamin/mineral.

But there's one nutrient you may never have heard of — and probably don't get enough of — that I recommend not as a supplement, but from some favorite foods: salmon and cruciferous veggies. 

It's choline.

Adequate intake of choline for men ages 19 and up is 550 mg a day, and for women it’s 425 mg a day. But in the U.S., men average 402 mg daily, and women get just 278 mg a day.

Most multivitamin/minerals don't contain choline. 

What is choline? It’s neither vitamin nor mineral — it's an essential nutrient produced in small amounts in the liver (though not enough).

It helps keep cell membranes intact, helps produce the neurotransmitter acetylcholine (that impacts memory, mood, muscle control, etc.), affects gene expression, lipid transport, and metabolism, and promotes early brain development.

Now, a study on mice in the journal Aging Cell says that a lack of choline also promotes amyloid plaques and tau tangles — brain changes associated with Alzheimer's disease — and causes dysregulation of proteins in an area of the brain that aids learning and memory.

Will that be true for humans? Stay tuned for more data.

But in the meantime, it's smart to add salmon and cruciferous veggies to your diet. If they don't appeal to you, get your choline from pistachios, cashews, beans, poultry, shitake mushrooms, and sunflower seeds.