One common misconception about nutrition is thinking you only have to take one multivitamin a day, and then you're set. People think, "OK, I've covered all my vitamins and minerals for the day because I took this one pill, and that's it." I have to laugh at that, because even though multivitamin pills may be helping them in some way, they don't provide sufficient nutrition for peak health or disease prevention.
In fact, if you ever find a study or a headline in the newspaper that says something like "Vitamin E is shown to have no benefits," that's because they were using an isolated, synthetic source of vitamin E. And, as is typical, they no doubt used very low dosage amounts. Any time a pharmaceutical company or a science researcher wants to discredit vitamins, it's very easy to structure a study that will do it. All they have to do is use very low doses and construct a bizarre set of study inclusion guidelines that eliminate all positive results. I've seen studies on vitamin E that were using a fraction of even the basic, minimal US RDA numbers, and even those numbers are way too low to be effective in the first place. So, of course, the results are going to be negative. But those results are manufactured for a political purpose (to discredit vitamins) and not at all based on solid science.
When I talk about nutrition and supplementation, I'm talking about taking literally dozens of capsules and eating several scoops of whole-food concentrate powder each and every day of your life. That's what I do; that's what healthy people do.
Why doctors misunderstand nutritional supplements
Doctors, by the way, don't seem to understand that these aren't medications, these aren't drugs: these are FOODS. So it's very difficult to "overdose" on any of these items; your body was actually designed to digest and assimilate these whole foods. It's just used to having them with more water than you might be providing if you're consuming them in a concentrated form.
Sometimes people ask me -- as if I were a doctor -- they will say, "How many capsules of Alive (a nutritional supplement) should I take every day? And should I take it with meals or between meals or should I have it with water or do I have to drink it with milk or juice?" And when people ask me these questions I immediately recognize that they have come from the world of pharmaceuticals -- they're used to asking these questions of their pharmacist or their doctor. They're used to thinking of everything as a drug.
These aren't drugs, folks, they're foods. You don't have to ask your doctor when to eat spinach. Do you eat spinach on an empty stomach or a full stomach? Do you have to drink milk with spinach or drink water with spinach? You don't ask such questions; you just eat these foods when you want to eat them. And the same thing is true with these supplements. You can take them any time of the day, with any kind of liquids, with or without meals, on an empty stomach or on a full stomach. It doesn't matter when you're consuming whole-food concentrates. Just get this nutrition into your body.
Avoid isolated vitamins and minerals
I also recommend that you move away from isolated vitamins and minerals. So forget about those cheap, low-cost bottles of vitamin C, vitamin E or those B vitamins you might find at the wholesale clubs, pharmacies or grocery stores. These are typically not going to do you very much good, because your body doesn't need just vitamin C; your body needs a whole complement of vitamins from a lot of different sources. If you want vitamin C, go with whole-food concentrates. You'll get plenty of vitamin C in a full-spectrum package that gives you antioxidants, phytonutrients, and cancer fighting compounds all at the same time; and none of that is actually listed on the label.
For example, if you buy the Alive Whole Food Energizer, you're not going to see on the label a listing of the B vitamins, the C vitamins, the antioxidants and so on, because it's not broken down like that. It just tells you what foods were used to make the product. From there, you have to understand that those foods provide those nutrients and much more in a full spectrum of great nutrition.
It's also important to take these supplements from several different sources. You don't want to take only superfoods every day and rely on that as your only source of supplemental nutrition. You don't want to take only the Alive food supplement and rely on that. You don't want to rely on any one brand; you want to have a variety of nutritional products so that you're getting whole food sources from three or four different manufacturers on a daily basis. This is the best way to be sure that you're getting a full complement of fruits, vegetables, mushrooms, microalgae, and other food sources that can provide peak nutrition for you.
This article is a content segment from the book, the Five Habits of Health Transformation by Mike Adams. The book covers the five most effective, yet effortless strategies for enhancing health. Written for busy people, it explains how to get the greatest health results possible with the least investment in time, money or effort.
About the author: Mike Adams is a natural health researcher, author and award-winning journalist with a passion for sharing empowering information to help improve personal and planetary health He is a prolific writer and has published thousands of articles, interviews, reports and consumer guides, and he has authored and published several downloadable personal preparedness courses including a downloadable course focused on safety and self defense. Adams is an honest, independent journalist and accepts no money or commissions on the third-party products he writes about or the companies he promotes. In 2010, Adams co-founded NaturalNews.com, a natural health video sharing site that has now grown in popularity. He also launched an online retailer of environmentally-friendly products (BetterLifeGoods.com) and uses a portion of its profits to help fund non-profit endeavors. He's also the founder of a well known HTML email software company whose 'Email Marketing Director' software currently runs the NaturalNews subscription database. Adams also serves as the executive director of the Consumer Wellness Center, a non-profit consumer protection group, and regularly pursues cycling, nature photography, Capoeira and Pilates. He's also author of numerous health books published by Truth Publishing and is the creator of several consumer-oriented grassroots campaigns, including the Spam. Don't Buy It! campaign, and the free downloadable Honest Food Guide. He also created the free reference sites HerbReference.com and HealingFoodReference.com. Adams believes in free speech, free access to nutritional supplements and the ending of corporate control over medicines, genes and seeds.
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Thursday, April 28, 2005
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