Taking vitamin and mineral supplements is generally considered to be a good health practice. However, in past centuries, people were able to stay healthy without supplements because they generally ate a healthier diet than we do today and their traditional wisdom told them to eat super foods naturally rich in essential vitamins and minerals required for health. They were, therefore, less prone to the degenerative diseases of today (e.g., heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, cancer) without taking natural or holistic supplements. In the past, foods were grown on small farms in mineral-rich soils.
Today, foods are grown in mineral-deficient soils on “factory farms” where the main goal is to produce high quantity rather than high quality food. In addition to this, with the advent of our fast-paced lifestyle, fast-food diet, and highly processed foods prevalent today, we no longer get the basic nutrition needed to stay well.
Modern technology has improved so much that we can now isolate the vitamins and minerals our modern day diet is missing that are required for health. But is this sufficient to promote optimum health and is this an improvement on what our ancestors ate?
When we extract a vitamin or mineral (isolated) from a food (or create it synthetically), how do we know that we have extracted all the components in the food (e.g., enzymes, amino acids, trace minerals) that are needed to make it absorbable in the body? What chemicals might that food contain that we need for health, but have not yet discovered?
Broccoli Is Broccoli – But Is a Vitamin a Vitamin?
Scientists are now discovering a wealth of phytochemicals in fruits and vegetables that promote health and are different from the vitamins and minerals previously discovered. Research shows that 90% of a fruit’s or vegetable’s antioxidant power is in the peel or just below the skin. Does your supplement contain the peel, skin, and pulp? More importantly, is it safe to take these isolated supplements in a pill rather than as part of the food they naturally occur in? Or could there be side effects from taking them in a way that is not natural to our body?
People in the U.S. are taking billions of dollars worth of isolated or synthetic vitamins with the thought in mind that these are going to keep them healthy when just the exact opposite is probably true.
Millions of people take one or more vitamins daily, and yet over half of the people in the United States are chronically ill. Something must be wrong.
Reasons Not to Take Synthetic Vitamins:
The Organic Consumers Association emphasizes that isolated vitamins cannot be used or recognized by the body in the same way as the natural version. Their campaign, “Nutri-Con: The Down Side of the Vitamin & Supplement Industry,” exposes the hazards and limited effectiveness of synthetic vitamins and supplements.
The Vitamin Myth Exposed by Brian Clement highlights:
So how can you tell if a vitamin is organic, as opposed to an isolated or synthetic chemical vitamin?
It you look on the label and it tells you how many I.U.’s or how many milligrams of different vitamins there are, you can bet that the vitamins are isolated or chemical.
The best vitamin supplements are those with labeled potencies derived from naturally-occurring, full-spectrum food extracts. Naturally-occurring vitamins are obtained by taking a nutrient-rich plant, removing the water and the fiber in a chemical-free vacuum process, and packaging it for stability. The entire vitamin complex is captured intact, retaining its functional and nutritional integrity and a full spectrum of nutritional values.
Natural vitamins are derived directly from plant material containing the vitamin, not produced in a test tube.
A word of caution: Unfortunately, vitamins can be labeled as natural if they contain as little as 10% of the natural form of the vitamin. This means that your “natural” vitamin could contain 90% of synthetically produced chemicals!
B-Vitamins and Vitamin C are usually synthetically produced.
When you buy organic vegetables such as Broccoli, Carrots, Tomatoes, etc. or plants and herbs such as Green Barley, Bee Pollen, Spirulina, etc., it doesn’t say how many IU’s or milligrams of this, that, or the other thing these plants contain, because they are in their natural whole organic form, in just the right amounts – the way God made your body to use them. Please, if you remember anything from this information, remember this! We should be getting all of our nutrients from organic plant sources in their whole natural forms, not from some isolated or manmade chemical source.
A healthy organic diet should provide a good amount of nutrients that the body needs, but supplements can help ensure that we are getting a healthy dose of specific vitamins.
OCA: “As we complement our organic whole foods-based diet with herbs and supplements, we need to make sure that these vitamins and botanicals are derived from naturally occurring plant and mineral sources, and that they contain no synthetic chemicals whatsoever.”
God created a perfect body that can only be sustained by perfect foods that God also created.
Anyone who desires good health must have proper nutrition every day, or good health is not going to happen.
Common Synthetic Vitamins to Avoid
Look for clues on your vitamin’s label that offer insight into the origin of the vitamin.
NOTE: The “dl” form of any vitamin is synthetic.
Other Toxic Ingredients to Avoid In Supplements
Related Articles:
Can Vitamins Cause An Electrolyte Imbalance?
(Some info on Vitamin D, Vitamin A, Magnesium and Calcium)
Vitamins – Common Misconceptions
The Invasion of Chemicals in Vitamins and Supplements