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Supplements

The media is always swift to highlight anything DANGEROUS. The Nanny state (UK) functions largely by creating fear. Supplements have not been immune to this nonsense. Before I give you the background on nutritional thinking, let me put these stories into context.

All nutritionists seem to agree that taking large quanities of a single vitamin is likely to cause long term health problems. This issue has arisen because supplement manufacturers have engaged in questionable marketing, clearly being far more concerned with making money than ensuring health. The simple fact is that our bodies use nutrients in a holistic manner - all the required vitamins and nutrients are needed in particular balance to each other. And, if we are persuaded to use just one or even a few specific nutriments, on their own they can cause a real imbalance in your system that could lead to all sorts of long term problems.

Using Supplements

The extreme positions for and against taking supplements still exist, but facts are stacking up thick and fast in favour of using supplements as part of a daily good nutrition program. I have not been able to find a single bit of evidence to support the people who still pooh pooh the idea - the only thing I can suggest to explain their position is that taking supplements is not a magic pill, i.e.:

you are unlikely to feel hugely better immediately when you take vitamin and mineral supplements, they work subtlely and naturally with your body and it can be many weeks before you notice a difference

you should not take supplements instead of eating a well balanced diet, instead they should SUPPLEMENT a well balanced intake of plenty of fruit and vegetables, complex carbohydrates, dairy products and some meat or fish or equivalent protein

Background

If you then look at what people in the nutrition field are recommending you will find many changes in the past 10-20 years, and a few very strong voices are emerging. Here are the most important points I discovered in my researches:-

• 20 years ago Alabama Medical College provided a concrete step in the move toward reassessing nutrition in the west. They discovered that 5 out of 6 (forty year old) people in the USA had the early signs of one or more of the major degenerative diseases - heart disease, arthritis, osteoporosis, diabetes, Alzheimer’s’s and cancer. The expectation was that these early indications would develop into so called age related illnesses by the time they reached their 60s. Cheraskin and Ringdorff looked at that one person in six who was free of the signs of disease and used their diets as a base for new dietary study.

• RDAs - those magic numbers used on every label that describes vitamin and mineral content in supplements and food is a standard set in the 1940s. It was set to describe the minimum of each element that you need in your diet to keep from getting ill. For decades we have misunderstood this, thinking that these Recommended Daily Allowances would make us feel well - instead they are in many cases less than what we need for optimum health.

• There is a new standard being developed called SODA - Suggested Optimum Daily Amounts. It is based on years of study and many surveys around the world. The SODAs give you a figure for the total amount of each element that you need to make you feel well, and that they think will help you feel well for years to come. The snag is that you need to subtract from each figure what your diet supplies to find your true supplement need.

Where we are now

The fact is that there is still no single agreement. The more studies that are made and papers written the more likely it appears that our needs for supplements can change depending on our age, the stress in our lives and our genetic inheritance.

In the meantime, there is enough evidence from diverse sources to say that we would all be wise to make sure that we have a very good diet, that we take a basic multivitamin and mineral supplement and that we try to reduce the worst stresses to our bodies.

Derby Stewart-Amsden

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