Nutritional Supplements is one type of your diet. which food or drink is best for your body and how to tack this. Nutritional Supplements is given only this vitamins which are required for your body.
How many times have you heard people say “Surely if I eat a healthy balanced diet, I will not need to take vitamins and minerals?”
“Expensive pee!” others exclaim.
When I started writing about health almost 15 years ago, I thought “Oh, it won’t tack long for people to change once they know the facts.” I was wrong. The Government’s campaign encouraging everyone to eat five portions of fruit and vegetables a day has fallen mainly on deaf ears.
A few people have changed but the fact remains that as little as 5% of the western population eats a truly healthy, balanced diet. The majority talk about healthy eating, but reality continues to eat far too much pre-packaged, refined junk food that are often packed with salt, sugar, additives and saturated fats. A few people still do not comprehend that the human body is literally made of food molecules, so your body is largely made up of what you have eaten during the last year.
Also, during the past five years, most commercial growers – especially from overseas – are harvesting more and more of their fruit and vegetables long before they are ripe. Research in Spain and at Oregon State University in America have found that when, for example, cherries are picked before being ripe the vitamin C content is halved.
When blackberries were picked early the green ones contained 74mg of anthocyanin (the blue pigment that is great for your eyes and immune system) compared with 317mg in the naturally ripened fruits. Add to this the fact that most fresh produce is flown halfway around the world – and then stored for long periods which itself hugely depletes nutrient levels – the message is obvious: as much as possible buy more fresh, ripe, locally grown foods.
To survive, the human body needs 50 factors, these are 13 vitamins, 21 minerals, 9 amino acids, 2 essential fatty acids, plus carbohydrate, fiber, air, water, and light. As our bodies cannot manufacture these substances, we must tack them in form external sources – through our diet and by taking the right supplements. If the body becomes deficient in nutrients, negative symptoms will eventually result.
We can all have treats and really enjoy them – but we must stop living on them. Many times I have watched people fill their supermarket trolleys with white bread, prepackaged meals, cakes, chocolate bars and fizzy drinks. Almost all this refined prepackaged and processed food contains virtually no vitamins, essential fats, minerals or fiber. We are bombarded with food advertisements claiming that product is ‘packed with added vitamins’. Have you ever asked yourself why the manufacturers need to add vitamins if the food is supposed to be nutritious in the first place?
Dr. Richard Passwater, who has worked as research scientist in Maryland, USA, for 40 years, states that refined sugars have had 99.9% of all their natural nutrients removed, and the only reason that there is 0.1% nutritional value left is because the manufacturing companies cannot figure out how to remove the last 0.1%. White flour and mass-produced oils are the same. Tinned foods are sterilized at high temperature to kill any bacteria. How many nutrients do you think are left after these processes?
Without a doubt, I advocate organic farming and the more farmers who switch to organic methods, the fewer pesticides, and herbicides (known to deplete even more nutrients from our food) will be in our food, water, and air. And organic food has been proven to contain more nutrients than non-organic produce. Fewer chemicals mean less acid rain, less pollution, and less sickness. GM food to my mind is another BSE/CJD-scenario waiting to happen – I would never knowingly eat GM foods. Intensive farming methods still use far too many antibiotics for their livestock – which definitely add to our health problems.
Natural mineral levels in soil in many countries, including the UK, are dropping and if vital nutrients such as selenium, known to reduce the incidence of cancer and heart disease, are not in our soil they are never going to make it into our fruits and vegetables. This is why, in countries such as Finland, selenium has been added to all fertilizers since 1984. As a result sperm count have risen and incidence of heart disease is falling.
Unfortunately, some people still compare vitamins, minerals and essential fats in capsule forms, to prescription drugs – but remember that essential nutrient are essential to life.
All these nutrients work synergistically, or together, inside the body. In a perfect world, it is always preferable to ingest all the nutrients we need from a varied diet. But most people do not.
Our eating habits have changed drastically during recent years. As little as 50 years ago, it was routine for the family to sit and eat home-cooked meals with freshly picked vegetables and fruits from a local farm or allotment. Today this tradition seems to have all but disappeared.
The longer fresh food is stored and cooked, the more nutrients are lost. If you leave an orange in the fridge for more than three days, up to 50% of the vitamin C content disappears. And, because the modern diet is less than perfect, we need to come to a compromise – hence I take nutritional supplements and recommended specific nutrients in this book.
Many governments suggest minimum amounts of nutrients, called RDIs – Recommended daily intakes. In Europe, there are RDIs for 19 nutrients and yet there are 45 essential nutrients required for health. Confusion is life as RDIs vary from country to county, so whom do we believe? Initially, the idea of RDIs was to prevent obvious signs of deficiency, such as scurvy (vitamin-C deficiency) in soldiers in the trenches in 1941.
However, they do not represent the quantities of nutrients we require for optimum health. Nor do they represent the level of vitamins and minerals we need to protect our bodies from the pollutants and toxins in our modern environment. What is more, RDIs tack no account of individual requirements such as age, gender or the health status of the person.
For example, the current RDI for vitamin C is 60mg – but to ingest this amount from your diet you would need to eat 10 apples, 3 kiwi fruits or 2 large freshly picked oranges. In the US, the RDI for the mineral chromium, which has been proven to halve the incidence of late-onset diabetes, is 120 mcg; yet in the UK or Europe no RDI exists. And to add insult to injury this is one of the minerals that the EU has excluded from its guidance list. This is lunacy. But there is hope.
A few years ago, I met a man aged 73 who had been refused heart surgery as his arteries were so blocked. He was deemed a lost cause, totally breathless, he could not even walk across the room. A nutritional physician friend took him on. First, she completely changed his diet, then gave him supplements proven to thin blood naturally, lower cholesterol levels and to help clear some of the plaque that had built up in his arteries. Under medical supervision, he was also taught yoga. After several months he slowly but surely regained his health. Today he climbs Alpine slopes as a hobby.
It’s never too late to change. And as western doctors are now seeing a plaque in the arteries of children as young as 10, change is imperative.
We all need to start eating food that is as unprocessed and unrefined as possible. Natural, locally grown organic food, without pesticides and additives, plus taking the right supplements is the way forward. There are now more than half a million clinical research papers showing that taken in the right amounts nutritional supplements can and do, work.
