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Why you need nutritional supplements Have you ever heard, "All you need is a balanced diet - nobody needs to take vitamins!"
However, the big question really is: "What is a balanced diet? How do you eat it every day in this day and age of fast foods?"
Who needs vitamins? In 1959 there were 300 additivies being used in our foods. Today there are a total of at least 2000. These include preservatives, antioxidants, emulsifiers, stabilizers and thickeners, bleaching and maturing agents, buffers, acids and alkalis, food coloring, and artifical sweeteners and flavors. This doesn't include sprays, fertilizers, antibiotics, and pesticides which get into our food. No one knows for sure what will be the combined cumulative effects of these elements after years of everyday ingestion. Most people eat food as a hunger satisfying agent, and as long as they fill their stomachs they presume they are well nourished. But for many, their tissue cells are weakened from malnutrition, making them more susceptible to disease. Most doctors diagnose and treat disease and do not concern themselves with this prevention.
Some of the candidates for vitamin and other nutritional deficiencies include 10 million alcoholics, over 25 million geriatric patients, over 23 million surgical patients, plus 5 million infected hospital patients. Added to these are the incalculable millions on calorie-reduced diets. Think of these figures when you read propaganda trying to persuade you that no one requires dietary supplementation.
But these figures are conservative, for one could add those who are on medically restricted diets for digestive and other disorders, and those taking the long list of medicines which interfere with vitamin or mineral utilization. Another group, whose numbers run into the million, are those with malabsorption or gastrointestinal disturbances.
The examples of how nutrients are missing or lost in unexpected ways are practically endless. A good example is milling whole grain products to produce white flour which reduces valuable vitamins, minerals, and fiber by an average of 10-80%. Many also know that boiling vegetables in water for extended periods of time is nutritional murder. Canning is another killer. One recent study showed that 44 percent of the vitamin C originally present in raw peas is lost in the canning process.
What is a well balanced diet? Getting all the proper nutrition from your food isn't as easy as it's cracked up to be. The often-heard statement that you can get all the nutrition you need from a well-balanced diet of ordinary food is totally out of touch with reality.
Based on the assertion that a "normal" person eating a "balanced" diet can obtain the "recommended dietary allowance: of all essential vitamins and minerals, the first question is: "Who is NORMAL?" Second, "What is a BALANCED diet?" and third, "Is the RECOMMENDED DIETARY ALLOWANCE of all ESSENTIAL vitamins and minerals enough?" The requirements of a person engaging in vigorous physical activity compared to a sedentary person vary drastically. Drugs affect a person's vitamin and mineral requirements. Vitamin losses brought on by stress may be one reason that gum disease has reached near-epidemic proportions in the United States. Nine of out 10 people have it before they reach the age of 35. Aspirin actually forces vitamin C out of your body. Antibioitics such as penicillin can cause deficiencies of many B-complex vitamins, especially pyridoxine, or vitamin B6. This certainly is not a well-balanced meal: a fast-food cheeseburger with ketchup and a slice of pickle, plus a side order of fries and a sugary milkshake.
Just what are nutritional supplements? Nutritional supplements are really a kind of food. They contribute to the values we expect to get from our food. We certainly shouldn't think of food supplements as drugs, because they aren't. They are rich sources of nutrients, presented to us in a convenient way.
Researchers know that nutrient requirements vary widely from person to person. Some people need considerably more than others. Because of this variation, a small group of research subjects cannot be reliably used to predict the needs of an entire population. Special needs for nutrients arise from such problems as inherited metabolic disorders, infections, chronic disease and the use of medications. People with such problems require special dietary and therapeutic measures. These conditions are not covered by the RDA. If you have heart disease, diabetes, cancer, recurrent infection, chronic diarrhea, anemia, or other disorders, your nutritional needs are very likely to be increased.
Actually very few of us are truly healthy. We are a nation of chronically ill people. One out of two will die from a heart attack. Over one out of four will die from cancer. Sixty percent of women will develop severe thinning of their bones after the reproductive years. If we were better nourished these degenerative problems would probably not be near as rampant. In a 1999 TV special on "Good Morning America" it was estimated that 60 percent of cancer in women was due to poor nutrition.
RDAs have three major limitations: (1) They apply only to healthy people, a group that is rapidly becoming extinct in our polluted and stressful environment; (2) Their purpose is to guarantee a minimal, rather than optimal level of nutrition; and (3) there is a high probabililty that even a totally healthy person looking only for the minimum will need more than the RDA of some nutrients.
Roger J. Williams (a pioneering nutrition researcher) speaks of metabolic differences among individuals of up to a thousand times. Certainly there are also great differences among individuals in the way they show deficiencies.
Do you take aspirin?
It blocks the uptake of vitamin C by the blood platelets.
Do you have an acid stomach?
Antacids decrease the absorption of phosphorus and may inactivate B1.
Are you uptight?
Phenobarbital increases the turnover of vitamin D, and decreases blood levels of B12, B6, and calcium.
Over $1.5 billion dollars are expended each year on food supplements in the United States. Millions of people can attest to their beneficial effects in improving their health.
A study by James Scala, Ph.D. (Nutrition Today, October 1980) of the institutionalized elderly exhibited resurgence of appetite and weight gain when provided with regular supplements. In this program none of the patients had exhibited external symptoms of vitamin or mineral deficiency prior to the study. His study also concluded that prolonged inadequate dietary calcium contributes to the increase of osteoporosis as a function of age, especially in women. His results show conclusively that bone density responds directly to calcium supplementation in every post-adolescent age group studied. Since one study used volunteers of an average age of 82, it also indicated that nutritional status can be significantly improved in a seemingly healthy elderly group.
Identifying the problem One problem with identifying deficiencies of nutrients is that - at least in the early stages - the symptoms all tend to look the same. Fatigue, malaise, insomnia, susceptibility to colds, bleeding gums, just a poor feeling in general: most deficiencies tend to produce these symptoms. Deficiencies also show up in the gastrointestinal system, in the form of indigestion, severe constipation and loss of appetite, and worst of all, in the peripheral nervous system such as tingling or burning sensation in the toes, burning feet (especially at night), sore calf muscles, and even irritability, depression, and confusion.
The RDA was designed for people who are already in good health, whatever that is. And the National Research Council's Food and Nutrition Board (the folks who brought you the RDAs) readily admits that the figures given in RDA tables are not designed for calculating individual needs.
What is a normal diet? In a society where about two-thirds of the food we're eating today wasn't around a few decades ago and won't be around 20 years from now, that's kind of a tough question to answer, isn't it? Every year, thousands of new artifical foods are invented to make millions of dollars of profit for supermarkets. One of the most common practices in the food industry has been to enrich food products with vitamins and minerals in an attempt to restore the nutrients removed during processing. In the case of bread, for example, about 15 nutrietns are removed and about five are put back. Enrichment, in this case, is really a misnomer. It's sort of like wearing a wooden leg. It gives the appearance of looking whole, but is not the real substance.
Did you know that canned foods are cooked three times before you even open the can? They're cooked once to kill the microorganisms in the food, once to drive out the air and to destroy all the enzymatic reactions in the food, and finally, a vaccuum must be created in the can. Is it any wonder that canned green beans look so sad when you open the can?
Even if your diet is excellent in most respects, it is the abililty of your body to absorb the nutrients in food that will ultimately determine your health. Elderly people often lose their ability to manufacture some of the necessary transport mechanisms which enable absorbtion to take place across the intestinal membrane.
Elderly people also frequently chew their food insufficiently due to poor teeth and much of the benefit of the food is lost in the stool.
The fact that we have witnessed an increase in the amount of heart disease, cancer and other degenerative diseases in the lst generation is no coincidence. All of the evidence points to the same culprits: the removal of fiber from processing, the increase of fat, refined sugar, and other refined carbohydrates in our diets.