The Baffling World of Nutritional Supplements

In an ideal world, kids should be getting enough nutrients from the food they eat. But we all know that is not always the case. Even if you buy organic whole food, your children will not always eat it. A sad reality for a vast amount of kids is that they like the processed food better. One needs to do the best that they can to provide their children with an organic whole foods diet. However, this is not always possible so it may be necessary to supplement their diet.

Whole Food versus Synthetic Supplements

There is a lot of controversy among nutritionists and much mixed data on what are the best forms of supplementation. Paavo Airola, N.D., Ph.D. studied world-wide vitamin research to find an intelligent answer. He states in his book, How to Get Well, "When you take whole food nutrients, you are getting all the vitamins and vitamin-like factors that naturally occur in these foods - that is, all those that are already discovered as well as those that are not discovered yet." Whole food supplements provide nutritional balance whereas synthetic vitamins can produce drug-like effects and cause the body to try to compensate for missing components.

Although there are numerous viewpoints on what kind of foods we should or should not be eating, as well as the ideal ratio of these foods, everyone from all corners of the diet and nutrition world seem to agree on one thing: No matter which foods we choose and in what ratios we eat them, whole foods are better for you than refined foods.

This fact has never really been argued. Everyone agrees raw honey is better for you than white sugar or that brown rice is better for you than white rice. Why should it be any different for vitamins? Just like refined foods, these refined vitamins have been robbed of all of the extra accessory nutrients that they naturally come with as well.

This does not necessarily mean that synthetic vitamins are useless. According to Dr. Airola, they can be very valuable in short-term therapeutic treatment of acute conditions or severe deficiency diseases. However, if you are supplementing in order to make sure your child gets the nutrients he or she needs for health protection and disease prevention; whole food supplements can do the job.

Whole Food Supplements

Whole food supplements are what their name suggests: Supplements made from concentrated whole foods. The vitamins found within these supplements are not isolated. They are highly complex structures that combine a variety of enzymes, coenzymes, antioxidants, trace elements, activators and many other unknown or undiscovered factors all working together synergistically, to enable this vitamin complex to do its job in your body.

Nutrients from within this complex cannot be taken apart or isolated from the whole, and then be expected to do the same job in the body as the whole complex is designed to do.

The perfect example of this difference can be seen in an automobile. An automobile is a wonderfully designed complex machine that needs all of its parts to be present and in place to function properly. Wheels are certainly an important part of the whole, but you could never isolate them from the rest of the car, call them a car or expect them to function like a car. They need the engine, body and everything else.

The same analogy applies to the vitamin C (ascorbic acid) or vitamin E (delta Tocopherol) you can find on most health food store shelves. They are parts of an entire complex that serve a purpose when part of the whole. However, they cannot do the job of the entire complex by themselves.

With similar logic in place, one can analyze what a typical multivitamin truly is. The automobile equivalent of creating a multivitamin would be going to a junk yard, finding all of the separate parts you would need to make up an entire automobile, throwing them together in a heap (or capsule in terms of the multivitamin) and expecting that heap to drive like a car!

Obviously, there is a difference. Science cannot create life. Only life can create life.

Synthetic or Isolated Nutritional Supplements

Isolated nutrients or synthetic nutrients are not natural, in that they are never found by themselves in nature. Taking these isolated nutrients, especially at the ultra-high doses found in formulas today, is more like taking a drug. Studies show the body treats these isolated and synthetic nutrients like xenobiotics (foreign substances).

By the same token, food-based supplements are never treated like this by your body. For example, your urine will never turn florescent yellow, no matter how much meat (a good source of B vitamins) you eat. This sort of rapid excretion happens only with foreign substances in your body.

Nature does not produce any nutrient in an isolated form. The nutrients in foods are blended together in a specific way and work best in that format. For an isolated nutrient to work properly in the body, it needs all the other parts that are naturally present in the food too.

If the parts are not all there from the start, they are taken from the body's stored supply. This is why isolated nutrients often work for a little while, and then seem to stop working. Once your body's store of the extra nutrients is used up, the isolated nutrient you're taking doesn't work as well anymore.

Synergy and Potency

The various parts of a natural vitamin complexes work together in a synergistic manner. Synergy means that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Nutritionist Judith DeCava puts it best: "Separating the group of compounds (in a vitamin complex) converts it from a physiological, biochemical, active micronutrient into a disabled, debilitated chemical of little or no value to living cells. The synergy is gone." In other words, the automobile, in its original form, will drive better than a pile of its individual parts. Most people don't follow this logic when examining nutritional supplements.

Supplement makers typically try to stuff as much as possible in a capsule, telling us that the more we take, the better it is for us. This is simply not the case. As you now know, it is not necessarily the amount of a nutrient you ingest that is important, but it’s the bioavailability of form that counts the most.

What all of this means: The potency of a supplement has much more to do with synergy than with actual nutrient levels. It is a combined effect of all the parts of the food, rather than the chemical effect of a single part, that is most important.

Sources:

1. Book: “The Real Truth about Vitamins & Anti-Oxidants” by Judith A. DeCava, MS, LNC.
2. Book: “How to Get Well” by Paavo Airola, ND, Ph.D.
3. Book: “Going Back to The Basics Of Human Health” by Mary Frost. BA.
4. Article: “Whole Food vs. Synthetic Supplementation” by Jane Sheppard; Executive Director of the Holistic Pediatric Association.
5. Article: “Real or Synthetic: The Truth Behind Whole-Food Supplements” by Daniel H. Chong, ND.

Judith DeCava's book, “The Real Truth About Vitamins and Antioxidants”, is thoroughly researched and documented. If you want to delve deeper into the benefits of whole food supplements versus the efficacy and possible harmful effects of synthetic vitamins, we suggest you read this book and the many cited works she lists.

Reprinted with permission from Ulan Nutritionals.