Are You Endangering Your Health By Using Nutritional Supplements?
An important principle in nutrition is synergy. This means the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. When we eat food provided by nature we are consuming a wide array of vitamins, minerals, protein, fats, carbohydrates and thousands of other chemicals besides.
When we ingest supplements, we are mostly taking only a very tiny amount of all the different chemicals found in foodstuffs into our bodies. A high dose of a very small amount of nutrients is not synergy, and is not a food supplement. It's drug nutrition.
A large proportion of drugs are derived from plants. The most potent extract of the plant is removed and made into a pharmaceutical preparation. The herbalist uses the whole of the plant.
Similarly, to make nutritional supplements, the chemist removes the most active part of the nutritional complex, uses this, and leaves out the rest. This is no longer a food supplement but a weak drug.
Ascorbic Acid Is Not Vitamin C
If the label on your supplement bottle states that vitamin C is provided only as ascorbic acid, then you are not getting vitamin C, but only a fraction of the vitamin C complex. To get the complex requires the bioflavonoids that always come with ascorbic acid in nature.
Alpha Tocopherol Is Not Vitamin E
If the supplement label states that vitamin E is only provided as alpha tocopherol then the supplement does not contain vitamin E. It contains a fraction of a nutrient. Vitamin E is made up of at least eight elements. Taking just a single element has potentially harmful effects on the body, which requires the whole complex for good health.
Beta Carotene & Vitamin A
Many supplements provide pro vitamin A in the form of beta carotene. While this does convert into vitamin A, it is only one fraction of the carotenoid complex which comprises 600 or more other pigments.
An early pioneer of clinical nutrition was Royal Lee. Back in 1940 he said that natural vitamin complexes contain everything that is contained in nature provided foods. If your supplement is synthetic, containing chemically purified nutrients then you are ingesting not vitamins but fractions of vitamins.
So now look at your supplement label with fresh eyes. Are you taking a concentrated food into your body or are you gulping down a drug?