Why you need to take Food Based Dietary Supplements

If you aren't taking high quality food based dietary supplements you are fighting a losing battle for good health over the course of your life. What do I mean by high quality food based dietary supplements? I was raised in a suburb of Los Angeles in the mid twentieth century, where produce was abundant. My introduction to nutrition was, of course, my mother who was a Home Economics teacher and always prepared meals using the 'Four Basic Food Groups'.

She prepared all of our meals. For dinner, we always had a meat, a vegetable, a salad, and a glass of milk. We didn't often have starches and almost never went out to eat. We also had our daily vitamin pill. I started reading about nutrition and supplements in the mid-1960's when health foods emerged as an outgrowth of the hippie counter-culture. I devoured information from Adele Davis and started getting into organic foods, cutting out red meat, eating whole grains, and drinking herb teas.

It wasn't until the 1970's, however, that I started studying the effects of vitamins and minerals on health. Most of my counter-culture friends were into bottled water, body work, and healthful eating, so it was easy for me to follow the behaviors of my friends and live a healthful lifestyle. I was so fascinated about the deprivation of nutrients in the food supply I was driven to learn more about what happened to get us where we are now.

During WWII scientists were hard at work developing chemicals to fight the enemy. Chemical warfare had been used to some extent in WWI but things 'blew up' during the 40's. Lots of chemicals were developed for killing life.

After the war, there was no need to have a chemical arsenal to kill people, but the technology was there and so a new industry emerged as a result. Pesticides! This was terrific advance to help deal with the booming post war population. After all, if we kill the insects that are eating a percentage of the produce, we will have more for us!

Now, scientists started being able to manufacture molecules for less money than it took to extract them from foods in the 50's and so they developed the synthetic vitamin market. The idea was to identify and isolate a specific nutrient and then synthesize it to regulate the amount of that substance in a pill. This mimics how pharmaceuticals are made and determines how effectively we can regulate supplements.

The RDA of a nutrient was established in the 30’s to ensure that the population had the minimum amount of nutrients to sustain life. So, to be able to manufacture supplements that have the RDA, synthetic vitamins were the most efficient and cost effective method.

The baby boom started in 1946 and didn't stop until the late 50's. During that time a couple of things changed:

1. We started spraying insecticides on commercial produce to increase the production on a much larger scale to adapt to the growing population.

2. We started using chemical fertilizers to grow foods faster.

By the sixties, people were ingesting plastics, polymers, synthetic vitamins, pharmaceuticals, and the like at unprecedented levels. Fast food restaurants came into being. People started consuming processed foods in amounts never before seen.

Supermarkets emerged as the new way to purchase food. The food was no longer locally grown but was picked green and artificially ripened just before they were put on the shelves. The valuable phytochemicals in the plants that give tomatoes and berries that taste explosion became less and less available.

But...did it work?
If you look at the statistics since people have been ingesting synthetic vitamins, the health of our people doesn't suggest it is working to counteract the effects of the deficiencies in the food. The United States ranks very low in comparison to other countries in the world, in terms of overall health and wellness and we spend more per capita on health (sickness) than any other country!

So, once I understood the reasons for our nutrient-depleted food supply, it was obvious to me that we need to replace the nutrients that are missing in the food—not with synthetics but with food itself.

One of my favorite books in the 1980's was The Vitamin Bible by Earl Mindell. I started purchasing individual vitamins and minerals and creating my own combinations to create the optimum mix. I did this until the mid 1990's when I was introduced to Food Based Supplements. That's when I learned how to truly support my health with nutrition through plant-based supplements and didn't need to memorize all the details of each kind of vitamin and mineral anymore.

There are four basic criteria you need to consider when choosing supplements: they need to be Plant Based, Standardized, Guaranteed, and made to GMP standards. Have you ever looked into how synthetic vitamins are made? It's a real eye opener. Many of them are made from petroleum!

Learn more about choosing food sourced, bio-available dietary supplements at www.the8keystowellness.com.