Supplementation is an important part of nutritional intake. The reason is that food in the United States has been rendered nutritionally inadequate due to poor farming methods. Imaging that one orange in 1950 could take as much as 15 oranges today to contain the same amount of nutrients.
The problem is there is so much confusion about nutritional supplements these days. Should I take vitamin C or A or B12 or E or all of them? What about things like selenium and alpha lipoic acid? Are they necessary? Should I take a multi-vitamin? Which one is best?
Marketing and internet-based opinions from every direction have left the casual consumer not sure what to do. It’s about time we straighten out this notion once and for all.
Let’s start with the most important concept about vitamins and supplementation: the only source of nutrition for humans (and animals) is food. That’s right, food. This is easy to understand once we get familiar with the process of vitamin and nutrient absorption. Vitamins and other nutrients are absorbed throughout our intestines to facilitate a sophisticated process that allows our body to utilize critical nutrition in just the right places. There are multiple processes and co-factors that are required for this system to work properly. Most of the cofactors needed are in the food themselves with a few being made in our body. For example, vitamin C complex contains 12 components and vitamin B complex has 24. Vitamin A complex has a whopping 64 components!
These components have been part of food on earth for more than 100,000 years. Our bodies require these components to recognize, process and utilize nutrients. When we take ascorbic acid as vitamin C, for example, we are only taking 1/12th of the required components (and the least
important one at that).
It’s no wonder that the Journal of the American Medical Association published a finding in 2006 that taking the anti-oxidants beta-carotene (vitamin A), ascorbic acid (vitamin C) and alpha-tocopherol (vitamin E) was connected with serious health problems. The negative health results were in every disease category, including melanoma, heart attack/strokes and autoimmune diseases.
