This article brought to you by Sky Forest Inn Event and Retreat Center
Article by Billie Bueler – Rim Chiropractic
You know you need more Vitamin D… or C… or B. You hear people talking about vitamins and going on and on about whichever one is on the news lately. A trip to a big box store will get you a huge jug of some vitamin for almost pennies and you will commit to taking them daily until you’re halfway through that jug and you realize, hey! These are making no difference to my body at all! What is that about?
You go somewhere else, A trendy little health food store that always has such healthy looking, quirky staff there to rush you when you enter the store. You leave with a bottle of virtual magic, at least that’s what they called it, and you get the twine off the top and take these capsules for another few weeks. The irritation you feel when you once more realize that these don’t do anything either is both because you still need the nutrient, and you still don’t have it despite spending time and money trying to get it! Are supplements really that big a rip off?
I’m going clear this up for you once and for all. Stop buying vitamins that are not clearly labeled as whole food. Just stop. They are not going to do much of anything except empty your wallet and fill your head with hopes for better health. Hope that is going to be replaced with disappointment when you don’t get any results!
What is the difference between your standard vitamin out there, and a whole food supplement? A LOT. Let’s dig in!
A whole food supplement is made from concentrated and dehydrated food. The whole piece of fruit, the whole plant, the whole organ or whatever nutrient source it is. The label will read like a recipe. Okra, alfalfa, carrot, sunflower seeds…. Etc. You won’t see anything on the ingredient list that is laboratory produced or synthetic. And why would you? Is your body deficient in preservatives, F, D & C red 40 or corn syrup? Yeah, mine isn’t either!
And that’s not all. Those other vitamins (humor me, here. We know calling them vitamins is a stretch, right?) are not only synthetic, they are only one chemical component of any given nutrient. The problem starts when a.) the nutrient is artificially produced and b.) doesn’t contain all the mineral, enzymes and other components! That’s important because when you separate these components, they now fail to provide the benefits so plentiful when they are presented whole. This singling out a part of the nutrient, and providing only a synthetic replacement renders it useless to the body. It’s unrecognizable and not absorbed. 1
For example, when scientists decided that vitamin E was useful, they isolated what they thought was the effective component, and called it Alpha Tocopheryl Acetate. First of all, they recreated it in a laboratory, so it is synthetic. And it is not complete, or whole. There are seven other components to vitamin E, and it takes all 8 of these components taken together to benefit our body! Same goes for the rest of them, vitamin C is more than ascorbic acid, but you will only get that one component when you purchase a vitamin C supplement that is not labeled “whole food.” Getting the ‘whole’ picture now?
Synthetic supplements also claim to provide hundreds, even thousands of mg per dose. In nature, you wouldn’t find that, and for good reason. The body can’t use that quantity! If it could, or if that quantity was good for us, it would be found in our food in that amount. A lemon can’t provide you with thousands of milligrams of ascorbic acid! That amount of ascorbic acid puts all your other nutrients at an imbalance. That is why too much of many nutrients can be as bad as too little. That imbalance can be the cause of bleeding, heart damage and other serious health concerns.
To sum things up here, multivitamins are great for filling in the nutritional gaps many of us have. Doing this with a whole food supplement ensures proper and complete absorption, and then use by the body. Read nutrition labels carefully. Be sure you are buying and consuming the entire nutrient, not just one component. Don’t throw your money away on fancy labels, catchy brand names and such. You want ingredients that are actually food, not chemical names. Look for the words “whole food” and avoid all the rest.
1 Burton GW, Trabor MG, Acuff RV, et al Am J Clin Nutr. 1998:67(4):669-84