RealJock:
Health in a Pill?
Vitamins and minerals are powerfully important substances your body needs to function at its peak level. Found in the foods we eat, each one has a different role to play. Vitamin D and calcium, for example, are needed for strong bones, while the B vitamins help you make energy when your body needs it (think lifting weights or running), vitamin A is crucial for night vision, and zinc and vitamin C help you heal and resist infection.
Hands-down, food, not pills, is the best way to get the vitamins and minerals your body needs. In fact, scientists have found that something called food synergy, the interaction that occurs between nutrients in food, has yet to be reproduced by simply popping a pill. Realistically, however, eating a perfectly well-balanced and healthy diet (including at least nine servings of fruits and vegetables a day, as well as whole grains, low-fat dairy, and lean meat, poultry, or fish) on a day-to-day basis is not always possible.
Taking a multivitamin and mineral supplement is a sensible insurance policy to help you fill in the nutrition gaps. But the question remains, which pill to take?
“…food synergy, the interaction that occurs between nutrients in food, has yet to be reproduced by simply popping a pill.”
True, for the most part, but not absolutely. Most supplements are synthetic and manufactured to contain an exclusive chemical compound; the nutrient on the bottle’s label. In natural foods, no nutrient is isolated, but comes with many additional substances such as the phytonutrients in plant-based foods. If you have a supplement that concentrates organic plant extracts (done by removing only the moisture and fiber content, and leaving the essential phytochemicals) then that “food synergy” remains intact.
It has been done, but not by the low-cost, Walmart brands. If you want absolute quality control in production, proven potency, and all-natural supplements, you will pay for them. Unfortunately, that’s something that is just not as much a priority for some as spending $4.00 at Starbuck’s every day.
Warning: The assumption that the mass-produced, factory-farmed produce you buy at the grocery store contains high levels of vitamins (and other beneficial nutrients) is dangerously naive. In the case of minerals, if they’re not in the soil, they’re not in the plant. Fertilizers that make big, abundant produce contain nitrogen, potassium and phosphorous. No farmer is replenishing his depleted soils with selenium, calcium, magnesium, iron, zinc, molybdenum, copper, chromium, manganese… unless he happens to be farming to attain high nutritional content.
The arguments on nutrition tend toward the extremes. The truth can be found somewhere in the middle.