Supplement
Why you need to take them & tips on buying them
June 25th, 2007

Introduction

People invest a great deal of money in health insurance, which should really be called sickness insurance because more often than not it is used after people become sick. The challenge is to stay healthy so that the sickness insurance does not need to be used.

Learning about and using dietary/nutritional supplements are two of the best investments that can be made to counteract the ravages of aging and disease and increase the chances of living with health and vitality.

What Supplements Are and Are Not

• Supplements Are Food
  • They are just in a form different from  conventional
    food.
  • They are not drugs or food additives. Again, dietary supplements are food. 
• Supplements Are Supplemental 
  • They are not meal replacements or substitutes for a healthy, nutrient rich diet
  • Most effective when tailored to fit the dietary, bio-chemical and health related needs of the person taking them.

Reasons To Take Dietary Supplements

• Established Safety, Effectiveness & Health Benefits
  • There is a compelling body of scientific evidence establishing the safety, effectiveness and health benefits of dietary supplements.
  • Generally speaking, research shows the health benefits of dietary supplements to be diverse. For example, they can:
    1. Help maintain optimal nutritional balance, which is central to staying healthy.
    2. Help the body to heal itself when injured from an accident or ill from disease.
    3. Help modulate the effects of aging.
    4. Help counteract the effects of unhealthy dietary and lifestyle habits (i.e., smoking, consuming too much alcohol, saturated & trans fats, processed foods etc.)
  • In a word, taking dietary supplements is one of the best things you can do to practice good health and take charge of it.
• Harmful Farming Methods
  • Harmful industrialized farming methods have decreased the diversity of foods, depleted the soil of vital minerals (e.g., calcium, chromium, magnesium, manganese, molybdenum & zinc) and contaminated the soil with pesticides and other toxic chemicals
  • Taking supplements (e.g., calcium, chlorella, kelp, selenium, aged garlic & zinc) can help eliminate and counteract the absorption of toxic chemicals and fill in nutritional gaps caused by industrialized farming.
• Harmful Food Manufacturing Methods
  • Then there are harmful food manufacturing methods, initiated around the Industrial Revolution.
  • Among the more so called “revolutionizing” manufacturing methods were:
  • Refining techniques
    1. Grinding wheat into white flour
       • Grinding wheat into fine white flour changed the micronutrient and fiber composition of the whole wheat grain.
       • Depleted vitamins & minerals such as zinc, magnesium, vitamin B6 and vitamin E found in wholegrain flour by three-quarters.
    2. Modifying sugar cane & sugar beet into refined white table sugar/sucrose
  • Preservation methods
    • Chemical additives in the form of artificial colors, flavorings, stabilizers & preservatives
  • Chemical alteration techniques
    • Hydrogenation process creating trans-fats, one of the more unhealthy foods we can eat.
  • Pressing techniques to extract vegetable oils for cooking and the making processed foods.
    • This resulted in the Western diet becoming over abundant in vegetable oils such as corn, safflower, sunflower, sesame, soybean and cottonseed oils.
    • Consuming too much of these polyunsaturated oils results in an imbalance between Omega 6 and Omega 3 fatty acids.
• Deficient Diet
  • This leads us to the Standard American Diet (SAD for short.) It is SAD.
  • According the CDC and USDA, the average American diet is inadequate in terms of meeting the recommended minimum of five daily servings of fruits and vegetables.
  • Moreover, as it was pointed out above, industrialized farming techniques and food manufacturing methods have also contributed to deficient diets by creating nutritional gaps in what is needed to stay healthy.
  • Thus, dietary supplements can play an important role in assisting in bringing our nutritional intake and status at least up to minimum standards.
• Harmful Lifestyle
  • In addition to a nutrient deficient diet, tobacco use, excessive alcohol consumption, a lack of physical activity and high levels of stress are lifestyle factors that contribute to disease and ill-health. Any one or a combination of these factors puts a person at risk of experiencing ill health and accelerating the aging process.
  • Dietary supplements can help modulate the impact of lifestyle factors harmful to our health. Taking dietary supplements is a far better insurance option than having to use health insurance/sickness insurance.

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