Are You Endangering Your Health By Using Nutritional Supplements?
By michael sellar | July 29, 2008
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Synergy is an important principle in the science of nutrition. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Nature provides us with food that contains a wide variety of different nutrients.
Nutritional supplements usually only contain a very small percentage of all the nutritional factors found in foods. Taking a supplement of this kind is not synergy and it’s not a food supplement. This is drug nutrition.
Something like a third of all drugs are derived from plants. The scientist extracts the most potent element from the plant, synthesises it, and turn it into a drug. The herbalist on the other hand uses the whole of the plant because it is much safer and contains synergistic factors.
In the same way, to make a nutritional supplement, the chemist will take out the most active element in the nutrient complex. This is what is used to make the supplement. This is now not a food supplement but a weak drug.
Is Ascorbic Acid Vitamin C?
Does the vitamin label on your supplement state that vitamin C is provided as ascorbic acid only? This isn’t vitamin C. This is only a fraction, albeit the most potent fraction, of the vitamin C complex. To get the latter requires the flavonols, flavones and flavonones that are found in bioflavonoids and fruit extracts.
Is Alpha Tocopherol Vitamin E?
Supplements usually only contain vitamin E as alpha tocopherol. But this isn’t vitamin E. It is only one fraction of the vitamin E complex. What happened to beta, gamma and delta tocopherols? What happened to the tocotrienols? Taking such an unbalanced fraction of a nutrient can have potentially negative effects on the body.
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.
One of the great early pioneers of nutritional healing was Royal Lee. In 1940 he pointed out that synthetic, chemically purified vitamins are not vitamins in the true meaning of the word. They are simply fragments of vitamins. Whole foods provided by nature contain these vitamin complexes. Supplements need to be derived from whole foods.
So look at your supplement label. Are you supplementing with foods or are you swallowing a drug?
Topics: Nutrition |
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