Years ago someone informed me that the only proven vitamin was cod liver oil, is this still the case?
Hello, Alex, "Supplement" is a VERY broad term. Anyone not receiving and adequate amount of something should use a supplement. (It just means "addition to personal diet.") That could (and often is) things like iron, calcium, phosphorus, etc.
I will not advocate supplements unless clinically necessary. In my own personal unpeer reviewed opinion and based on my observations, people who take supplements as a means of avoiding paying attention to their diet are more likely to have imbalances rather than balances in nutritional intake ( ie I take supplements so I'm covered). Secondly, we are still completely in the dark as to nutrient nutrient interactions and taking isolated hyperdoses of one nutrient while ignoring its potential interactions with others is not a sensible approach to health.
Vitamins are important. You can consume it and has no side effects. On the other hand, still ask your doctor about this.
View attachment 5599 Is it a matter of paying attention to their diet, or is it a matter of being able to afford to eat healthy? Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! In my experience, the establishment does not want a healthy population. The death care industry, HMO's, insurance companies, doctors, and bureaucrats all make a lot more money treating the ill than keeping people healthy. Why do you think we are, "still completely in the dark" about what the human body needs to stay healthy and operate at optimum efficiency? Duh. Because that would be bad for the economy. Do you think America's recent health care overhaul has any room for nutritionists and natural care practitioners? Absolutely not. They want people continually treated, not cured. Health care in the western paradigm isn't about wellness, it is about treating illness. http://www.naturalnews.com/027433_liver_oil_cod.html From the research I have done though, it really matters WHICH product you buy though. Many of these cod oils are faked, and their vitamins contents are artificial, and/or have been tampered with or contaminated. Only purchase oils originating from the North Atlantic.
I sadly confess that from my observation of people being treated by the 'health care industry' and from years of working in retail grocery and watching all the manufacturers first resist new labeling and nutritional guidelines and then scramble to be first to be politically correct, I have become quite cynical whether any of these organizations has any incentive for the population to be healthy. Doctors should be the first ones to advocate good nutrition yet many of them look less healthy than their patients and they would rather prescribe pills and if the pills don't provide a quick fix, then perhaps some tests and a new round of medication. I tend to think that this is pretty close to the mark...
That's not entirely true. Vitamin D is fat-soluble. If you build up too much it can be toxic. I find it fascinating that people who appoint themselves as nutritional experts never consider food as a source of pleasure. There are quite a few things in my larder that make me extremely happy when I eat them. I don't give a bloody damn how "good for me" they are, within broad parameters. "Completely?" I thought I was the king of exaggeration around here. My doctor is from India and knows more about nutrition than anybody. A doctor is like any other professional. You have to do your homework and choose wisely. As for "natural care," yeah, exercise, yoga, meditation, and anything that improves your mental health will have an effect on your somatic health. But some of this stuff is pure woo-woo. It works by the placebo effect. These days virtually anything from the sea is contaminated with mercury and other poisons.
I've been on and off with various health kicks. I have since determined that the human digestive tract is so versatile, that we can exist on just about anything. In recent years I have experimented a lot. I've gone many years without eating meat, with no side effect. I finally stopped worrying about heavy metals and added a lot of seafood to my diet. But the only time I take vitamins is when I have the flu, or whenever I think I'm not getting a balanced diet. When you think about, we seem to have an odd doubt about whether the stuff we eat is sufficient in nutrients. The nutritional supplements industry is leveraging this. In my opinion it's mostly a scam. Obviously people with certain illnesses will need supplements. But why do we tend to think the stuff we are eating is insufficient? If pandas can exist on bamboo, then we ought to do fine on just about any protein source, with a few fruits, grains and vegetables to supplement it. In other words, this need for something else, or the fear of a nutritional imbalance, must be some kind of delusion.
Actually that's not quite true. All the other Great Ape species are herbivores. They graze on leaves and other plant tissue. Like the ruminants (cattle, hippos, deer, camels, etc.) they have a bacterial culture in their gut that produces the enzymes necessary to break down the cellulose in plant tissue so they can digest it as starch. They augment this diet with insects, frogs, etc., as well as nuts and seeds, which, in addition to the bodies of the bacteria themselves, satisfy their dietary need for protein. (Goats, wildebeest, giraffes, etc., actually don't need the extra protein like gorillas and orangutans do because they have better bacteria, but that's another story.) As our evolutionary line diverged from the chimpanzees, one of our ancestral species figured out how to knap flint and make blades. They used these blades to scrape the leftover meat off the bones left by the predators. This greatly increased their protein consumption. This allowed their brains to grow much larger (your brain metabolizes more protein than all the rest of your body, IIRC) and they kept getting smarter. Before long they were attaching their blades to sticks and going hunting. Each subsequent species had a slightly larger brain and a slightly larger protein intake. Eventually a species called Homo sapiens emerged that had (proportional to size) a colossal brain. He developed language, planning and organizational skills, fancy new weapons, and became the first full-time predatory ape. During this transition (which took several million years) his gut got smaller. He was getting so many calories from the meat he was eating that he no longer needed to eat leaves and no longer needed that large bacterial culture. This is the reason that you're wrong: we indeed cannot exist on just about anything. We need massive amounts of protein, we need vitamins that we can no longer synthesize, and although we can digest starch to increase our calorie intake, we cannot eat it raw. Cellulose has to be broken down by heat ("cooked") before we can digest it. If we're diligent and careful, we can get our protein from plant tissue. The seeds of most plants have quite a bit of protein. This includes nuts, legumes, and grains, in addition to obvious sources like sunflower seeds. But many of these protein sources are wrapped in cellulose. This is why we have to cook our grains and our legumes, although we can eat most nuts and seeds raw. But there's more. Our bodies are pretty good at taking the amino acids in the protein we eat and converting them into whichever amino acids are needed for today's maintenance and repair. However, there are several amino acids that we need in relatively small quantities, so our bodies never developed the ability to synthesize them. They're abundant in meat, of course. Regardless of your ethical feelings about meat, we are carnivores just like tigers and weasels, and can subsist exclusively on meat. But if we're trying to get by on the protein in plant tissue, we have to be careful. Several of those "essential amino acids" are missing in grains and legumes but plentiful in nuts and seeds, while another set is missing in nuts and seeds but plentiful in grains. So you have to be sure to balance your plant proteins or you'll get some icky protein-deficiency disease like marasmus or kwashiorkor. (Ooh, just typing their names makes me feel icky.) Throughout history, this doubt has been quite reasonable. At the end of the Paleolithic Era, just before the Agricultural Revolution ushered in the Neolithic, when everybody ate three meals a day of meat, the life expectancy of a human who had survived childhood (infant mortality was around 80%) was 50-55 years. Then civilization was founded. Raising animals for their meat is a very inefficient use of land. When communities started growing to the size that we would call genuine "cities," it took a lot of farmland to feed all those people meat. Remember, there was no transportation technology yet. No wheels, no carts, no oxen, goats or horses to pull them. Everything had to be carried by hand, or on a travois, a triangle of sticks that people put over their shoulders and let one point drag on the ground. Imagine not just growing enough pigs, chickens or cattle to feed all the people in a city, and then imagine getting the meat to them before it spoiled. Sure, they could dry the meat, but that just made the process even slower and more complicated. Instead of growing crops to feed the cattle, it was much more efficient to feed the crops to the humans. Bread (or rice, corn, or whatever grain was growing in a particular region) became a staple. Augmented with a little bit of milk or eggs (which are much more efficient use of the land and which also can be kept longer than meat), humans had their full complement of protein. However, people in the Bronze Age and even the Iron Age knew nothing about vitamins and minerals. People could survive for quite a while on grains with a little dairy, but their bodies began to break down before long. Bottom line? Starting with the 50-55 year adult life expectancy of the Stone Age, the life expectancy of a surviving adult in the Roman empire was less than 30 years. Of course the nobility got lots of meat and they lived longer, but the peasants and slaves did not. So if you think we eat bad now, look how far we've come from the Romans. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! As for the pandas, they are a species of bear, but they're as different from all other bears as we are different from all other apes. All other bears are carnivores, although most of them are lazy-asses and will scavenge bread and pasta from your trash if its convenient. But just as we changed from herbivores to carnivores, pandas did just the opposite and changed from carnivores to herbivores. That change is much more complicated! Digesting plant tissue is a much more complex process than digesting meat: the very same tissue we ourselves are made of so the molecules just slide right in there. As a result, pandas can digest only bamboo. They evolved for its particular kind of cellulose. Their gut has exactly the right chemistry to nurture exactly the right bacteria that have the secret skills to break down the specific kind of cellulose in bamboo and turn it into protein and starch. So don't be envious of the panda. If some horrible pest gets loose and kills all the world's bamboo forests, pandas will become extinct. I hope you understand now why that is not correct.
The source of the oil has nothing to do with contamination, it has to do with the producer. Oils made in northern Europe are more pure and better balanced. The oils made in East Asia use artificially injected sources of A and D and are not balanced. They do this to stretch the amount of oil per amount of fish gathered. I am talking about the quality of the oil, not necessarily the quality of the fish.
It is a common misconception in America that it is expensive to eat healthy. Many Americans have come to depend on processed foods, and "healthy" processed foods are often exorbitantly priced. Instead consider foods such as beans, rice, oatmeal, and in-season produce. These things are much healthier than what the average American consumes. As far as meat is concerned, whole chickens can be bought for $0.89/lb. Cook and freeze the meat while using the bones to make broth. You then have sodium-free prepared lean meat and sodium-free broth. Delicious, nutritious, and quick to reheat (or it's good cold!). We are very fortunate to be living in this day and age, and grocery stores are a prime example of why. Unfortunately many do not take full advantage of our access to a wide range of cheap, nutritious foods from around the world. S.A.M. hit the nail on the head: we should get our nutrition from food. I do not consider NaturalNews to be a good source by any means. There are far better sources of health information out there. One such source is the Linus Pauling Institute at Oregon State (link). Many governments and universities have made quality information available as to assist people in making informed decisions. I recommend using these sources. You are probably right about some not considering food as a source of pleasure. I used to be driven to find happiness in pleasures such as food, but I no longer depend on the desire for temporary satisfaction. Many think that these temporary satisfactions are what make life worth living. Dissatisfaction in the absence of "temporary satisfactions" demonstrates underlying discontent in the mind. I noticed this in myself and sought to overcome it. I have come to realize that in ridding oneself of desire, one gains the clarity necessary to realize what is needed to be truly happy in life. (By happy I mean: content, satisfied with life, and equanimous in the face of adversity. Many people obsess over happiness which is why I chose the word).
There's a common story amongst doctors who treat the elderly, particularly surgeons who have to do comprehensive examination of the patients before surgery.. They have two kinds of patients. 1. The normal kind on a laundry list of prescription drugs. 2. The kind where they ask the patient if they forgot to list their drugs, and find out they have been taking vitamins for years. Over the course of a lifetime supplements make a huge difference. The marketing that you take them and you knee stops hurting next week, or that type 'instant fix' stuff is not accurate. They work over the long term. Good vitamins and supplements like those made by Twinlabs, the kind where when analyzed they actually have the ingredients in the amounts the list on the label(most vitamins don't), are a very good thing for people to take long term. You can overdo anything, including vitamins. Anything in life can become toxic if you overdo it, including water, oxygen, fluoride, etc.
This is an awfully broad statement; supplements encompasses everything from vitamins to diet pills to natural male enhancement. Perhaps this is the "huge difference" that you are referring to? I kid, I kid. But with regards to nutritional supplements, the studies I've read over the years paint a different picture than you do. Here's one published in March of this year: Keep in mind the the vitamins found in supplements are synthetic, unlike the vitamins found in whole food. Healthy food also contains many other beneficial nutrients that support good health, as the latest research continues to demonstrate. It seems as though the surface has barely been scratched, and beneficial compounds are only just beginning to be identified as such. I highly recommend WHFoods.com for overviews of the latest research involving many healthy foods. Click on "Food List" at the top. Also be careful because some supplement companies try to deceive customers into thinking their multivitamin is derived entirely from food sources. Such is likely not the case, even if it seems like it is. This is indicative of a dishonest company.
