Do we need supplements? Can’t we get all the nutrition we need from our food? Why should we take a bunch of pills every day?
These are actually very good questions that deserve some very good answers. Let’s start with the question of getting all we need from our food. The simple answer is yes; if we ate all the right things we could get our nutritional needs met by the foods we ate. The problem is that we do not eat the foods we need – not by a long shot. In fact most of the foods we eat today are anti-nutrient foods that require us to eat a bunch of other good foods to counteract the negative effects of what we do eat.
What do I mean anti-nutrient foods? I am talking about all the foods most of us love the most – foods filled with sugar, salt, flour, fried vegetable oils, processed, preserved, artificially colored, flavored, and laced with toxic pesticides, hormones, and GMOs. These are poisonous anti-nutrient foods that require us to eat a boatload of healthy high-nutrient vegetables and herbs to help our liver, kidneys, and colon detoxify the poisons out of our bodies.
How many of you eat six cups of all the right vegetables to detox away each slice of pizza or small sized burger you eat? What’s that I hear you say? “Nobody does that. There is no room in my belly after three more slices of pizza and the half pint of ice cream!” Each day the food consumed by the average American would require a week of eating intense amounts of vegetables and herbs in order to clean the body and regain the health lost during that one day. That may sound like I am exaggerating, but I am not. The amount of toxicity in our
food supply today is astounding. Fifty years ago our food supply was still fairly healthy and the diseases of old age, like diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and so on didn’t happen until we actually got old. It is a testament to the amazing recuperative powers of the body to handle poisons that we last as long as we do.
But we are being overwhelmed. Diseases, that we as doctors never saw in folks until they reached their late forties or fifties if they led a rough life, are now showing up in average teenagers. Liver disease, kidney disease, heart disease, colon disease, “late onset” type 2 diabetes now onsets very early. This is one reason why we take supplements – to fight the rising tide of poison in our food, water, home and work environments.
The second reason for taking supplements is that we don’t eat the foods that have the nutrients we need to begin with. That fresh kale salad you had last week is certainly a good idea, but you need to eat that every day along with another couple pounds of varied vegetables from healthy sources every day. Last week I wrote about gelatin. In that article I mentioned how, to be healthy, you must eat organ meats along with the muscle meats. That means eating liver, spleen, heart, kidneys, tongue, thymus, ligaments, bone broth, and intestines. The very idea grosses us out, but the reality remains. Eating just muscle meats, without the high glycine organ meats, shortens our lifespan and makes us sicker.
The third reason for taking supplements is that the good foods that could be helping us don’t have the nutrition in them they used to have. Soil depletion of vital minerals is one reason, but the bigger reason is that none of the fruits and vegetables that appear in our grocer’s shelves existed 50 or 100 years ago. Everything has been hybridized to produce nicer looking, more shelf-stable produce at the expense of the nutrition inside. For instance, the levels of vitamin A and C in many fruits and vegetables are only 1 to 5% of what they were 100 years ago in the versions available back then. We have been breeding our fruits to have progressively higher and higher levels of sugar in them because sugar sells well – even though it is a pure poison to the health of the body. Your body can only tolerate three teaspoons of fruit sugar – fructose – each day. Every bit of fructose beyond that acts on the liver just like alcohol, producing fatty liver disease and eventually liver cirrhosis.
The fourth reason for slamming down those supplements is that our petrochemical industry is creating thousands of new chemicals every year that have never existed in nature before. These chemicals are ending up in our food and water supply. Our poor body is desperately trying to figure out how to cope with this onslaught, and it needs every bit of vital health it can muster. Living on a diet of devitalized foods does not give it the energy it needs to keep up with the toxic chemical burden it is faced with. Many highly specialized herbal and plant extracts can help our body deal with this burden. This is using plant extracts as medicine instead of simply eating it as food. Here we are using a concentration of plant components that we could never eat enough of in our diet. For example, the amount of curcumin extract from turmeric I put in my anti-inflammatory chocolate bars is equal to about how much you would get in 20 to 30 spicy Indian meals made with natural turmeric.
Physicians have been using plant extracts as medicine for thousands of years. These would be classed as food supplements, since they are made from natural plant
sources. Actual medications we get at the pharmacy are generally synthetic copies of these natural compounds that have structures that can be patented. You can’t patent natural plants extracts.
So lets recap: we like unhealthy food, we won’t eat the foods that are healthy, our world is progressively getting more toxic, and what healthy foods we could eat are getting progressively less potent. We simply can’t get the nutrition we need to survive, much less be healthy from our modern food supply. Even a wacko like me, who makes all my own food from healthy sources, still takes a bunch of supplements each day to cover all the things missing from the foods I cook.
But even with that, no amount of supplements can compensate for a bad diet. The level of poisons in the food today makes that impossible. Even with handfuls of supplements daily, you must avoid the poisons and consume healthy foods as often as possible. Shoot for 90% of your diet being from healthy food sources. Avoid vegetable oils – especially fried foods. Avoid sugar – especially from soft drinks. Avoid flours – especially wheat and corn. Drink clean, pure water – no chlorine. (Chlorine is an antibiotic – that is why they put it in the water).
What supplements do you need? That is the subject of lots of other articles based on your needs. Everybody needs lots of phytonutrients of many sorts, as well as a broad range of vitamins and minerals. Everybody needs magnesium and probably calcium. Everybody would benefit from fish oils and probiotics. And everybody definitely needs more fiber. These are the basics. Beyond that the list is huge, based on what damage we have each accumulated to date.