Better nutrition from food sources?

The typical vitamin company reason that today’s food is somehow less nutritious because the soil is depleted does not hold water. Plants have specific requirements in the way of soil nutrients, sunlight and water. If plants don’t get enough of these things, growth is stunted and production is reduced — if the plant survives at all. If farmers were planting in depleted soil, they would be unable to produce enough of their crop to afford to stay in business. They know this, so they add back nutrients through cover crops and fertilizers. Soil management science is quite advanced. Think of all the advice and products they have just to make lawn grass look greener!

Why is food a better source?

We really should all attempt to get all the nutrients we need from food. If you make a study of nutrition, you’ll find that the basic nutrition required for survival is readily available if you eat adequate proportions of meat, dairy, whole grains, and a variety of fruits and vegetables. If you delve further into the realm of antioxidants, then what jumps out is that one needs fruit and vegetable coverage by color (green, dark yellow, red, purple) as well as foods like tea, beans, citrus, cruciferous vegetables, and sources of resveratrol, Omega 3 and 6. The complex interworking of multiple micronutrients in these foods does not appear to have been studied completely. We can at this point make a couple of observations:

• Vitamins give us a specific dosage of a specific nutrient, but not the entire nutritional value of the source food.
• We see the effects of the Mediterranean and Asian diets on longevity, and they’re getting nutrients from food versus supplements.

It also seems like real food sources make it much less likely that we’d consume too much of a nutrient – something easy to do by going overboard with a supplement. While most extra nutrients are simply excreted and result only in a waste of money, some have some ugly consequences (read about Vitamin D). In addition, they keep coming out with more micronutrients that they’ve identified, so who knows what great stuff is in food that they haven’t even turned into a pill yet?

So why do I take supplements?

I do just that: supplement what I think I’m missing from my diet:

• Vitamin D – I’m not outside enough to manufacture enough from sunshine and they’re now saying we should have more vitamin D than they thought before
• Omega 3 & 6 – Because I don’t eat enough from food sources
• Multivitamin with calcium – Except when I’m being particularly diligent in nutritious eating

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Vitamins

A multivitamin is a preparation intended to supplement a human diet with vitamins, dietary minerals and other nutritional elements. Such preparations are available in the form of tablets, capsules, pastilles, powders, liquids and injectable formulations.

The question is often asked whether multivitamins should be taken each day. There are people who believe that we will get all the nutrition we require from the foods that we eat but this is no longer the case.

Many of the foods we eat are processed and have all sorts of additives that can be detrimental to our health.

Even fresh foods don’t have the same minerals that they once had.

In some growing areas most of the minerals that were once in the soil have long since been depleted and the food that is grown in that soil doesn’t have the same values as we have come to expect.

Additional stresses are placed on our health with pollution, work stress and so on, all making demands on our body and the nutrients that we need. Even fitness training, while good for our health, places additional demands on the body and this is best addressed with supplementation.

A good multivitamin taken once or twice a day can help to balance out any deficiencies that we might have. This will help us to train better and to stay fitter and healthier and not become as susceptible to illness. Most of the best multivitamin supplements include a balanced proportion of vitamins and nutrients that meet the recommended daily dosage for an average person.

If you are doing intensive fitness training then your requirements might be higher than normal and that might necessitate additional supplementation. Once of the most effective methods of testing your needs for vitamins and minerals is through hair sample testing.
Hair sample tests can give you an accurate graph of your levels of vitamins and minerals and based on this information you can supplement your diet to bring back a balance in your nutrition.

Sometimes deficits in these areas can take months to address and without accurate testing the process will take longer. Everything from smoking to alcohol will deplete the body of essential vitamins and minerals. Supplements will help to counter these effects.

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