Whole Food Supplementation

WHOLE FOOD SUPPLEMENTATION

“Whole food supplements are not synthetic vitamins and minerals. They are “concentrated real food”. They contain nutrients, living enzymes, and life force energy, in the exact proportion that nature intended…Remember your body is deficient in nutrients such as vitamins, minerals, enzymes, and various cofactors. There is no way that you can get all the nutrients you need by eating food. You would have to eat ten to twenty times the amount of food as you are now, and it would all have to be organic for you to meet your minimum nutritional needs. Nutritional deficiencies cause disease. Having the proper amount of vitamins, minerals, enzymes, and cofactors allows your body to operate as it was designed.
Nutrients from foods 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.

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.

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).

The various parts of a natural vitamin complex 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 a nutritional supplement.  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 its form and how much is bioavailable that counts the most. In fact, remembering that ingesting single nutrients can actually create imbalances in the body, logic would dictate the higher the level of a single nutrient that you take in, the quicker this imbalance will occur.

What does all of this mean?  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.

How do you tell whether or not a supplement you're looking at is a good choice?
For starters, make sure it has the following characteristics:
• It is as close as possible to its natural form.

• The utmost care has been taken in all phases of its
   production, from growing its ingredients, to manufacturing,
   testing for potency and quality control.

• Always try to select from companies that have a long track record
   of providing high quality products that produce good clinical results.