Need for Supplementation
100 years ago no one had heard of vitamin supplements. So why do we need them now?
3 Main Factors have caused the deteoriaton of vitamins and nutrients in our food supply
1) Food Storage and Transportation
As foods age they deteriorate. The food industry doesn't like this because it makes it hard to ship foods long distance. So chemicals are added to preserve foods and give them a longer "shelf life". The chemicals "preserve" the food, but don't do anything for the nutrients.
Even fresh fruits or vegetables may be sprayed, gassed or fumigated in order to make them look "ripe" and "fresh". So what looks healthy isn't necessarily as healthy as you may think.
2) Fertilizers and Pesticides
Pesticides are actually posions. They are sprayed on foods to kill insects and parasites. As the plants grow, they actually absorb the pesticides. Use common sense, can that be good for you at all? No...
Fertilizers are used instead of crop rotation. Before farming got commercialized, farmers rotated or planted different crops every couple of years on their fields. This was to allow the soil to build back up it's nutrients. Once a plot of land was farmed to much, crops wouldn't grow because of the lack of nutrients in the soil!
Now with fertilizers are used to make plants grow. While it produces great looking crops, it's nutrient deficient.
3) Quantity over Quality
Food production in America is all about quantity now. Supersize this, extra large that. Almost no focus is put on the quality or amount of nutrients in our food.
What do vitamins, minerals and nutrients do for the body?
The best way to understand this it to use a simple example. Have you ever cut open an apple and noticed that with in a few hours it starts turning brown? Once Oxygen hits the cut open apple it starts "oxidizing" the apple. Oxidizing is bad. Damaging particles known as "free radicals" start damaging the apple. Free radicals come from stress, pollution, radiation, too much sunlight, cigarrette smoke and so on. Free radicals are around us all the time.
Many people will squeeze lemon or lime juice over a fruit salad to stop it from turning brown. The Vitamin C in the juice is an anti-oxidant and helps protect the fruit from free radicals and oxidizing.
Nutritional Supplements do the exact same thing. They give your body protection against free radicals. Instead of free radicals damaging our body, they'll just link up with a vitamin or mineral instead and leave the body.
Below are pictures of cells. You can clearly see what the cell looks like when it has "oxidation defense" (Vitamin supplements) and when it does not.
The science community is finding stronger and stronger evidence for the use of vitamin supplementation.
The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) surveyed 16,000 Americans and found that not one person obtained 100% of essential nutrients such as magnesium, vitamin E and zinc.
"Most people do not consume an optimal amount of all vitamins by diet alone. Pending strong evidence of effectiveness from randomized trials, it appears prudent for all adults to take vitamin supplements.”
- June 2002, Journal of the American Medical Association