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Whole Food Supplements – Are They Worth It?

Brett — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 08:26:43 +0000

In my last entry I talked about the term ‘natural’ in relation to nutritional supplements and then made some comments on a whole food multivitamin supplement which a reader asked me about.

This particular supplement was marketed in a very clever way to stress the importance of taking only a natural supplement with natural “whole food” ingredients.

If you read my comments you will see that product is nowhere near as good as it claims to be and because of the huge amount of vitamin C it contains it offers consumers very poor value for money. And some of the “whole food sourced” ingredients it promotes actually do not occur naturally so there’s a nice example of bending the truth to say the least.

Today I thought I would stay with this ‘whole food’ theme.

Another reader (Deb) contacted me early this year and asked my opinion on whole food supplement formulas. You can find her question on the ‘Your Questions’ page at nutritional-supplement-truths.com

So here is a reduced version of my answer to Deb.

Point No.1

Whole foods, fruits and vegetables in this case, are chocked full of crucial vitamins, minerals, fiber, and micro nutrients including potent, disease conquering phytonutrients, a number of which scientists have isolated and many which they believe they don’t know about yet.

Eating whole foods is absolutely the way to go and for a large part of the population there is a need to eat A LOT more –

particularly raw vegetables. Studies show that people (especially adult females) avoid the dark green vegetables in particular. (These are key anti-cancer promoters! )

I eat ALL my vegetables raw. (75% of my entire diet is raw!)

That’s because a extraordinary bio-scientist in Australia explained to me the necessity of this. This amazing lady has a near perfect record of curing cancer in people who seek out her help as well as all kinds of other diseases and medical conditions (all of which stem from nutritional and lifestyle factors!)

So putting aside the extensive on-going debate about the extent to which cooking your vegetables destroys crucial enzymes and nutritional content, I recommend you eat your fruits and vegetables raw.

So, to the question at hand:

SHOULD WE TAKE IN WHOLE FOODS THROUGH SUPPLEMENTS?

Most people under 50 today know about the importance of eating fruits and veggies (and those over 50 always knew) but they don’t want to eat them – certainly not in sufficient quantity. They’ve been cajoled and lured by food scientists/manufacturers/marketers over many years to enjoy the taste of fat and sugar.

But now there appears to be a magic bullet that people, who know they’re not consuming enough fruits and vegetables, have wished for, for so long.

A way to take in enough of those boring fruits and bland tasting vegetables by simply swallowing a whole food pill or three while still continuing to consume nutritionally poor diets full of great tasting (but nutritionally deficient) processed and junk foods.

And whole food supplement manufacturers are playing on this for all they can get.

Unfortunately it’s just not that easy and here’s why.

You would have to be swallowing handful after handful after handful after handful of these whole food vitamin supplements each and every day to be getting the equivalent nutritional value that comes from eating fresh fruits and vegetables.

To take whole foods in supplement form is simply not a practical solution for health conscious consumers!

Consider this:

When preparing a whole food (fruit or vegetable) to be an ingredient in a supplement, the water must be removed by either spray or freeze drying.

After the water is taken out you are left with an amount that is between 1/10 th and 1/50th of the original food mass.

In other words if you had a supplement containing 500mg of a freeze dried whole food then that would be equal to between 2.5 – 5 grams of the real fruit or vegetable.

To put this in perspective, an average sized banana is about 125 grams. So, our 500 mg supplement provides the gross weight and nutritional value of only about 1/25th to 1/50th of a banana!

About one small bite of the banana!

To get the equivalent of one normal size banana you would need to take from twenty five to fifty whole food supplements (500 mg tablets/capsules).

See what I mean?

And I won’t bother to get into the other negatives involved in the preparation of whole food ingredients, like sterilization, milling and distribution times.

Ask yourself why would you bother to purchase a whole food supplement when one decent meal will give you the equivalent nutritional value as about one month’s supply of the supplement.

Think about the cost difference!

And keep in mind that the example above involves only one bite of one type of fruit.

You need a WIDE spectrum of fruits and vegetables daily to take in all the various nutrients you need for good health and to avoid nutritional deficiency based disease.

The Bottom line:

Whole Food Multivitamin Nutritional Supplements SHOULD NOT Be Used As Any Kind Of Substitute For Eating Fresh Vegetables And Fruits!

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Natural Vitamin Supplements – What is “NATURAL” ?

Brett — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 07:38:13 +0000

Any return visitors to nutritional-supplement-truths.com will see that there is a large scale site reconstruction going on.

Everything is being completely revamped with a new format, design, color scheme, interactive pages, new content and some revision of existing content. It’s all being jazzed up!

I’m doing ALL of this myself and since my HTML and CSS knowledge is somewhat limited it’s taking far longer than expected to get all those changes displaying in your browser exactly the way I want.

Anyway for those that saw the old site I’m sure you’ll agree that the new design is far better and easier to move through.

The reason I’m mentioning this is to let you know that because of all this additional work my blog will only be updated 1 to 2 times a week for the coming months (or until it’s all finished).

So I hope you will bear with me and continue to read the juicy supplement and [tag-ice]health[/tag-ice] truths that I have in store for you.

Today’s entry explains the word “natural” as applied to [tag-ice]nutritional supplements[/tag-ice]

and my second entry later this week will look at a related subject – [tag-tec]Whole Food supplements[/tag-tec] and what they really give you.

Here we go!

Natural Vitamin Supplements

What Does That Word ‘Natural’ Really Mean?

The term [tag-ice]‘natural’[/tag-ice] has become a super buzz word in the supplement industry of late. Unfortunately it’s causing a lot of consumer confusion and so-called ‘expert’ argument to say the least.

And recently I considered (for a short 5 min period) of entering into the ma lee when I came across a nice keyword that a web page could be based around. From memory I think the exact keyword was “[tag-tech]natural vitamin supplements[/tag-tec]“.

My initial thought was to write a page around this keyword and then link it to the supplement my family and I personally use. After all, as you’ll understand in a minute, it can be argued that my supplement ([tag-ice]Total Balance[/tag-ice]) has no non- natural ingredients whatsoever!

Therefore it must be a ‘natural vitamin supplement’.

Technically I could argue that Total Balance is ‘natural’ but therein lies the problem because of the very definition of the word ‘natural’.

The more I thought about it the more I realized that this whole topic of ‘natural vitamin supplements‘ is an absolute can of worms. So I decided the best course of action would be to steer well clear of it as a web page and instead address it here in my blog.

The reason I say ‘an absolute can of worms’ is because the term ‘natural’ has a multitude of meanings, all of which are VERY SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT.

The problem is that there is no one definition that is the ‘right’ or ‘correct’ version. We can’t stick something in a test tube, analyze it and say “Yes,” this is natural or “No”, this is not natural.

The thing to remember is that this whole fixation on ‘natural’ comes from clever marketing that presents natural’ as good and ‘[tag-ice]synthetic[/tag-ice]’ as bad.

Thus many consumers have been bombarded into believing this. In the last couple of years manufacturers of ‘natural’ or whole food supplements have really been turning their marketing dials up full load.

Now, there are 2 main aspects to consider when looking at the term ‘natural’.

Firstly, when does something become ‘not natural’?

If a scientist was to make up a small amount of DNA in a test tube from precursors and [tag-tec]enzymes[/tag-tec] (a common process today), is this ‘natural’? In terms of the structure and properties of DNA it is no different to the DNA found in every cell in our bodies.

The only difference is that the DNA in our cells is closely coupled to a raft of other materials (RNA, proteins, cofactors, enzymes etc) that allow it to do its various jobs. If a scientist put the manufactured DNA into your body it would be absorbed and used just as if it were ‘natural’.

In a similar vein I think everyone would agree that [tag-ice]isoflavones[/tag-ice] present in a plant are ‘natural’. But what happens when those isoflavones are concentrated by extraction? Are they still ‘natural’?

How about if we performed a series of concentration steps and wind up with a highly concentrated form (say 90%) of the isoflavones. Are these still ‘natural’? If so, what if we chemically synthesized an identical material that contains 90% isoflavones?

What is the difference between the 90% stuff from the plants and the synthesized material? The two materials are, for all intents and purposes identical.

So why would one be ‘natural’ and the other not?

Can you see what I mean?

The second aspect is that there are lots of things which are ‘natural’ but which are actually bad for you.

For example red kidney beans need soaking before cooking to get rid of a powerful neurotoxin that is present as a normal part of their growth and development.

Many plants produce cyanide as a pesticide.

[tag-tec]Ginkgo Biloba[/tag-tec] extract contains ginkgolic acids that are poisonous.

Yet all these are ‘natural’!

So ‘natural’ is not always best!

That’s why you need to be careful before running off to buy [tag-tec]natural health supplements[/tag-tec] based on that gut feeling you get after reading a supplement company’s nifty marketing presentation.

They’re telling you what you want to hear based on what they and others have led you to believe.

A visitor to [tag-tec]nutritional-supplement-truths[/tag-tec].com asked me recently to comment on a whole food [tag-tec]multivitamin supplement[/tag-tec] for sale at a very well known supplement site.

This is a ‘doctor’ formulated supplement and for those of you who have read through my site, you know my opinion of doctor formulated supplements!

In his marketing spiel this doctor boldly attempts to scare his readers away from any [tag-tec]synthetic vitamin and minerals [/tag-tec](isolates) in supplements by stating that our bodies will only absorb a small percentage of an isolate form of vitamins and minerals and utilize even less. He goes on to say that our bodies absorb much more of the [tag-ice]whole food[/tag-ice] form.

But the truth of the matter is that we don’t actually know this for sure!

We assume it is the case, and we want it to be the case, but we simply do not know!!

I asked a friend in the supplement industry to add some backup on this for me by checking the scientific literature (he has access to a lot more than I do) and he came back to say he COULDN’T FIND A SINGLE STUDY that has looked at the absorption/utilization of ‘synthetic’ materials in the human body versus ‘natural’ materials.

Not a single one!

So you see this is an example of the kind of statement that people want to believe and so they do believe it, but there is no scientific evidence one way or the other.

In situations like this I recommend adhering to a very basic tenet: “If it isn’t documented, it’s a myth”.

Whoever writes the web-page copy for this doctor’s site is very good. They make this particular [tag-tec]multivitamin[/tag-tec] sound like the next best thing in supplements and something that you must have.

However, a closer look at the label reveals the following:

1) Over 75% of the total ingredient load is simply vitamin C, one of the cheapest materials in the supplement industry. That’s shocking!

2) They cannot be “[tag-tec]whole food sourced[/tag-tec]” because calcium ascorbate and niacinamide ascorbate (among others) DO NOT OCCUR NATURALLY !

3) The [tag-ice]amino acid[/tag-ice] chelates of the minerals also do not occur naturally!

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The bottom line is that these whole food ingredients are no better in terms of their ‘natural’ function than many other ingredients on the market.

So please keep in mind that there is a lot of supplement information out there that has no actual basis – or, even worse, is just plain wrong. In other words, deliberate lies and misrepresentation of the truth.

Unfortunately we humans have a tendency that if we want to believe something and it is repeated often enough then it becomes ‘true’, even though there may not be a scrap of evidence in support of the idea.

It’s the old story that if you throw enough mud for long enough some will stick.

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