Some articles wait until the end to give you the “juice”, but here we go, from the beginning: Your keys to a good selection of nutritional supplements are: 1. It is as close to its natural form as possible. 2. The utmost care has been taken in all phases of its production, from cultivation, to harvest time, to manufacturing, potency testing and quality control. 3. It works! I always try to choose from companies that have a long history of providing high quality products that produce good clinical results.

Americans now spend more than $17 billion a year on health and wellness supplements. But the rates of some forms of chronic disease have not changed, while the rates of others have actually increased. There are a number of reasons for these poor statistics and many things remain a mystery.

I’m not saying there aren’t helpful supplements, but doctors and new research are saying exactly that. That vitamins are causing more harm than good. I know of one whole food nutritional supplement that defies these odds and actually has the clinical research to back it up. In this article, as a layman and former professional athlete, I will discuss a few things to consider if you want to take some supplements. Specifically, I will address the differences between whole foods and isolated or synthetic nutritional supplements.

Most people who are used to reading about health are familiar with the idea that whole foods are better than refined foods. This is a fact, although there are numerous points of view about what kinds of foods we should or shouldn’t eat, as well as the ideal proportion of these foods. Although everyone seems to agree on one thing: no matter what foods we choose and in what proportions we eat them, whole foods are better for you than refined foods. Right?

Here’s a short train of thought, something like A+B=C. Read the next few lines and see if you can relate to my confusion. So there I am sitting in consultation with a nutritionist, who talks over and over again about the value of whole foods and speaks out against refined foods, which have been stripped of all the nutrients they come naturally with, they are not healthy for you; But then…they keep prescribing a grocery bag full of refined isolated vitamins for me to take! (Whatever: vitamin A, B, B12, C, or maybe even vitamin D- (which in the body is actually a natural hormone). And the list goes on and on and their wallets get fatter and fatter. WHAT… I don’t get this, do you? On the one hand, they’re saying don’t eat man-made food, but here swallow man-made vitamins. Don’t they both come from the same ilk and level of fillers, consciousness, and money? Do vendors like to rip off? This fact has never really been disputed. Everyone agrees that raw honey is better for you than white sugar or that brown rice is better for you than white rice Why should it be different for vitamins?

In a short article by Daniel H. Chong, ND, I found him stating that; “Like refined foods, these refined vitamins have been stripped of all the additional accessory nutrients that they come naturally with. In turn, like refined foods, they can create numerous problems and imbalances in your body if they are “They’re taken at high levels for a long time. They can also act more like drugs in your body, forcing you to go one way or the other. At the very least, they won’t help you as much as high-quality food and food-based supplements.”

Let’s talk about the concept of whole food supplements. Perhaps to better get our point across we’ll create an analogy from the auto industry. A car is a wonderfully designed complex machine that needs all of its parts to be present and intact, in place and to function properly. The wheels are certainly an important part of the set, not just 4 of them, but a spare has been shown to help one in tune. So now imagine a clever scientist, who comes and removes all 4 of your tires and isolates them in a parking lot. He then trades his zippers for a $50 suit and a $5 tie and tries to sell the next person who passes by those tires as a whole car. We know this will now work. Isolated attempts are not the whole. Also, you can’t put sports car tires on a 4X4 and have the vehicle run properly. Smartly, we could never isolate the tires from the rest of the car, call them a car, or expect them to function like a car. They need the engine, the bodywork and everything else. How could this be done then… “Marketing”!

On the other hand, from isolated nutrients, there are whole food supplements that are what their name indicates: Supplements made from concentrated whole foods. The vitamins found within these supplements are not isolated. They have their synergistic friends with them called phytonutrients. 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 synergistically together, to allow this complete food supplement to do its job in your body. Scientists now know that the nutrients found within these complete food supplements cannot be separated or isolated from the whole, and are then expected to do the same job in the body that the complete supplement was designed to do.

The same analogy applies to vitamin C (ascorbic acid) or vitamin E (delta tocopherol) that you can find on most health food store shelves. They are parts of a complete and complex whole of nature that has a purpose when they are part of the whole, but when isolated they act more like drugs and become dysfunctional parts that your body now has to take in to convert essential energy to use or expel as toxins Isolated vitamins cannot do the job of the entire supplement by themselves.

Using similar logic, one can analyze what a typical multivitamin actually is. The automotive equivalent of creating a multivitamin would be to go to a junkyard, find all the separate parts you would need to make a complete car, throw them together in a pile (or capsule in multivitamin terms) and wait for that pile to drive like a car. ! So how did multivitamins get so popular? “Marketing”

Our bodies are a miracle of nature. While on the other hand, isolated nutrients or synthetic nutrients are not natural. Think about it, have you been walking in the woods and found a multivitamin bush or a vitamin C tree? In fact, taking these isolated nutrients, especially in the ultra-high doses found in formulas today, can cause toxicity, illness, or weaken the immune system. How is this so? Many research studies now show that the body treats these isolated and synthetic nutrients as xenobiotics or (foreign substances). On the right side of this argument are whole food supplements or plant-based supplements that your body never treats as “xenobiotics.”

For an isolated nutrient to function properly in the body, it also needs all the other parts that are naturally present in food. If the parts are not all there to begin with, they are taken from the body’s stored supply. This is why isolated nutrients often work for a while and then seem to stop working. Once your body’s store of extra nutrients is depleted, the isolated nutrient you’re taking doesn’t work as well anymore. Worse yet, a deficiency in these additional nutrients can be created in your body.

The various components of whole food supplements work together synergistically. 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) turns it from an active, biochemical, physiological micronutrient into a weakened, disabled chemical of little or no value to living cells. The synergy disappears.” .

The potency of a supplement has much more to do with the synergy of natural phytonutrients than actual nutrient levels. Vitamin manufacturers generally try to cram as much as possible into a pill, telling us that the more we take, the better it is for us. This is simply not the case. As you already know, it’s not necessarily the amount of a nutrient you eat that’s important, but its purity, form, and bioavailability that count most. Bioavailability means that your body can easily recognize and use the supplement. I highly recommend that plant-based supplements be your first choice.