Establishing a nutritional base

Establishing a nutritional base

The quality of food in developed countries is worsening such that we are becoming unhealthier. Nutritional deficiencies are likely the cause or a major contributing factor to your illness or low energy.

Let's begin by comparing the advantages and disadvantages of getting our nutrition through healthy eating versus taking dietary supplements.

Getting nutrition through eating nutritious food

The advantage to eating nutritious food is that it provides us with a wide range of nutrients. Food includes nutrients that we do not know much about from a scientific viewpoint but may well be important to our health, in addition to substances that help us digest and absorb nutrients and maintain the health of our gut. Furthermore, if we are free from food addictions, we are attracted to foods that contain the nutrients that we, as individuals having different genetics, need at a particular time. We can let our bodies guide us in our consumption of nutrients.

However, we might want to consider the following complicating factors.

- Do plants and livestock even contain the nutrients that they are supposed to? Owing to changes in farming practices, plants have less access to nutrients in the soil. Specifically, we have destroyed much of the microbiome in the soil, and it is this microbiome that makes nutrients available to plants. Crops and animals do not make minerals, rather they get minerals from the soil. Our food can thus be deficient in minerals. Moreover, food is now stored for long periods and transported over great distances, during which time the levels of nutrients such as vitamins decrease. We cannot solely rely on what an information sheet tells us is supposed to be in a particular food. Rather, we must also consider how our food is being grown and where it comes from.

- Modern versions of fruits and vegetables have been modified such that they are often very different from what the fruits and vegetables were just a few decades ago. These modifications have often been at the expense of the nutrition that the fruits and vegetables contain.

- The processing of food typically removes nutrition.

- Few foods in the health section of the supermarket are healthy.

- Even a natural food can be a poor choice. For instance, spinach contains a high level of oxalate, which is a substance that many people, if not all people, should avoid. Many people should be treating potatoes, tomatoes and capsicums as poisons as they can bring on an arthritic episode. Others will react to the sprays applied to fruit.

- How can we consume the EPA and DHA forms of omega 3 if we can no longer afford to buy fish regularly?

- Can we consume enough of a nutrient to have an immediate therapeutic effect? For example, a single ordinary tablet of vitamin C might have 20 times the vitamin C content of a lemon and thus be a better solution for treating an illness.

- Can we consume enough nutrients from food to address a nutritional deficiency that we have had for decades? Addressing chronic deficiencies typically requires high-dose supplementation.

- Are we overeating because our food is no longer nutritionally dense and we are therefore unsatiated by consuming a normal volume of food? That is, can we eat a more suitable volume of food and maintain better weight if we also take dietary supplements?

- Do we have a diet that sounds good on paper or suits our beliefs about what is healthy, rather than a diet that actually suits our genetic package? Are we getting caught up with ideology?

Getting nutrition by taking dietary supplements

The advantage to taking dietary supplements is that they provide nutrients in far higher doses than food. Moreover, we can use supplements to fill specific nutritional gaps in our diet. Furthermore, we can take supplements in high doses as medicines, either to address nutritional deficiencies that we have suffered for years or decades or to supply our immune system with what it needs to work optimally when fighting infections.

However, we must consider the following when relying on supplements.

- Do we know what the body needs? Do we know how much of a nutrient to take? Unlike consuming food, there is no taste feedback guiding our consumption of a nutrient.

- Are we taking the nutrient in a high enough dose? In many cases that a dietary supplement is ineffective, the issue is that the dose is too low. Regulators often limit the dose of a vitamin or mineral that a dietary supplement can contain, sometimes for good reason but usually not.

- Even in the case of a high dose, are we absorbing much of the nutrient? Many dietary supplements are not well absorbed or utilized, although nutrients do tend to be better absorbed and utilized when the body needs them. For example, when you are in good health, your body might be able to handle the consumption of only a few grams of vitamin C whereas it handles many times this amount when sick. Furthermore, in premium supplements, the minerals are chelated with amino acids such that they are absorbed similarly to minerals naturally occurring in food and the vitamins are encapsulated in liposomes so that they can be absorbed in doses many times higher than vitamins in food.

- Are we taking a multivitamin dietary supplement so that we can excuse ourselves when eating poorly?

- The high dosing of one nutrient can reduce the absorption of another nutrient.

- The body typically uses a nutrient in combination with other nutrients. Do we have all the co-factors that we need to properly use the nutrient that we are supplementing? For example, we might want to take vitamin K and magnesium when supplementing vitamin D.

- Are we feeding our infection through supplementation? Our body's immune system uses a wide array of nutrients to work optimally, and it benefits from supplementation, but a bacterial or other infection might feed off the same nutrients.

The overall point

The overall point is that both healthy food and dietary supplements play their roles in health. We consider it best that we learn to use both forms of nutrition well, in a considered way, rather than to get overly ideological about what is and is not natural or what should be the sole solution for good health.

Working out the diet that best suits you

Most diets proposed nowadays work well because they reduce your consumption of processed foods and/or encourage you to prepare and cook your own food. Hence, raw vegan, carnivore, keto and other diets all have their supporters despite being very different from one another.

(Note that these diets work only if done properly. A carnivore likely needs to eat organ meat. A vegetarian cannot exist on potato crisps and bread.)

The idea that there is one diet that works for everyone is beyond ridiculous. We have very different genetics. One person might have been born to eat raw meat and liver, whereas someone else might have been born to eat fruit and fish. Think about what you do best on.

Ideally, we can determine the nutrients that we need by paying attention to what we want to eat. A food rich in a needed nutrient will be appealing to us, until we have consumed enough of that nutrient. However, such intuitive eating requires us to first overcome our addictions, particularly our addictions for sugars and carbohydrates and flavourings. Are you really wanting the nutrition in that apple or are you addicted to the sugar in the apple? Typically, we become satiated after eating enough of a nutrient that we need, whereas we cannot stop eating or drinking something that we are addicted to. Eating one food at a time, such as just carrots or just broccoli, gives us a better chance of working out what the body needs. This means that there is no sauce on the food. You are a born carnivore if you like raw or rare meat, not if you like to cover your steak in flavourings.

Determining nutritional deficiencies

Determining your deficiencies from your symptoms alone is challenging. First, different nutritional deficiencies can have similar symptoms. Second, the symptoms of a nutritional deficiency can be similar to the symptoms of a nutritional overdose, for the same nutrient.

Therefore, in addition to paying attention to your symptoms, consider getting blood tests. But first, do your research. Learn the adequate level of a mineral or vitamin. Find out what is specifically being tested in a blood test; e.g., in the case of iron, is the test measuring the serum iron or the ferritin or the transferrin or the hemoglobin or the iron-binding capacity or something else, and what does that matter? If you are involving your doctor, walk into his or her office knowing what you want tested. Work out an affordable way to get tests done at regular intervals, whether that be through your doctor or insurance company or by going to the testing laboratory directly.

In saying the above, blood tests themselves are not the holy grail to health. They provide limited information for you to work with. Ultimately, it is how you feel that guides you.