I don't agree with the statement that we don't need supplements. We don't even know all of the micronutrients that are diminished in the food chain. There are raging debates about soil demineralization: fact or fiction? being carried on by University profs and corporate attorneys, all way more in-the-know than we will ever have cause to be.
We continue to find new stuff out about what influences our ongoing health, all the time. To say "we take lotsa supplements and die anyway at #41 life expectency" is to commit the logical fallacy of equivocation: Two things that land on the same scatterplot are not causal of each other. The issue with American health is one of gluttony with crap, getting obese while starving to death. We eat foods devoid of decent content, overbred, genetically modified, inbred, producing indigestable protiens while lacking viable enzymes from being overprocessed, and eat a ton more sugar in a single year than our ancestors had access to over their lifetimes just 200 years ago.
Lets add the following issues to a soup, and see what happens:
- Grains bred for size, pest resistance, and yield, producing "new" protein formations undigestable by our body's (ever wonder why corn looks the same coming out as it did going in? Do you really think that digestability changes if we grind it up and make corn flakes out of it?). But that's OK...foods contain their own enzymes that aid in the lysis of protiens during digestion, right? But wait! Those only help if we don't denature them chemically during processing, or through heat during cooking. Anybody wanna think about all the stuff that happens to the wheat in your morning cereal from conception to consumption?
- Soil demineralization was an issue 80 years ago. Anybody here think it's gotten better since then? We add in 3 main minerals that help push growth in the plant, but ultiumately lead to greater acidification of the soil, and more demineralization of alkaline nutrients that benefit our health. Don't take my word for it...research both sides of the issue, and get back to us.
- We eat more junk food and processed food containing chemical substitutes known to be carcinogenic, than at any time prior in human history. And while they are starting to catch up to us in other Westernized countries, we still have a serious head start. Go buy a chocolate shake and big mac at McDonalds, and set them in a corner of the garage where nothing can eat them. Go look at them in a month, then 6 months, then 1 year. They don't break down under natural conditions of rot or decay, because of the plastics in them; more mutagenic garbage we can't digest, but our body will try anyway, leeching out digestive enzymes as they try to gnaw on this stuff. Think we can or should live off plastic? So...you may be more health conscious than your countrymen, cuz you are a martial artist....so you don't eat lots of Micky-D's. But go watch the drive-thru line at lunch, and count the number of people popping in. Then multiply that by the number of McD's in the nation, and that by the number of days in the week. Seem like a formula for good national health? Think maybe some of that might be contributing to that high morbidity rate? Maybe a more direct correlation than supplements?
- Serving sizes -- So, you're supposed to have a couple servings of this a day, and a couple servings of that a day. Do you, or anybody you know, really 1) know how big a serving of it is, or 2) make sure that only a serving of said food is on your plate while you eat? While we lack the essential micronutrients for vital health, we pig out on the amounts of empty calories we consume. We eat massive amounts of useless food, plugging up our digestive tracts (GI cancer anybody?), fouling our guts (indigestion is a multi-billion industry, fixed by cutting serving sizes and adding alkaline foods or supplements, which have global positive effects on health...see anybody bitchin' about those darned Pepcid and Mylanta people bilking mindless consumers out of their hard-earned pay?), causing putrefaction in abundance which caseates the intestinal walls, leading to the leakage of food wastes into the bloodstream, where it triggers inflammatory reactions that contribute to cancer, heart disease, stroke, CFIDS, fibromyalgia, etc. (don't take my word for it...hunt down the TIME magazine article on Inflammation from several years back, outlining the specific chemical pathways and mechanisms by which inflammation acts as the number one cause of other diseases in first world countries), osteoarthritis (how many drug companies benefit from little old ladies continuing to have brittle bones?), and more.
- So...inflammation triggers a buildup of inflammatory protiens in the interstitial spaces (the space between sheets of cells), which diminishes nutrient absorption and waste elimination of the cells in that organ, compromising organ function, leading to health dysfunctions first, and diseases second. What have you done lately to break up and rinse out these excess extra-cellular protiens? Think the answer to addressing that comes in a bag of chips and a coke? Any foods at all that you might buy from Safeway or Lucky? Or might one need to address this nutritionally, since the stuff we put in the front of our heads is what goes to our cells, and fills the aquarium they swim in?
Better idea...lets wait until it gets so bad, that we start showing multiple health symptoms. And rather than put the fire out by changing the nutrition and exercise habits that jacked us up in the first place, let's just turn off the fire alarm through the gratuitous application of multiple meds that mask and diminish symptoms, while ignoring causation. Then, when the wheels come off the wagon, we can say, "but I went to my doctor, and he put me on ____ , so I did my part" and absolve ourselves of responsibility for our own best well-being? That'll be great comfort to you while you lay there post-stroke, justified in not having minded your food and supplement intake, cuz the doctor never made you, and because beta-sitosterol and freeze-dried glandulars didn't appear anywhere on the Food Pyramid.
The food chain is deficient in the substances our bodies need. Time was, we ate the whole animal, including organs. Obscure mineral salts from sundry organ tissues found their ways into our diets in small amounts...hence the word "trace". Now we just eat the skeletal meat of animals raised on mass-produced grain, forced to grow under chemical influence, and -- despite the swollen size of their body mass -- essentially starving to death at the time of slaughter. But we'll call it "good enough" nutrition, because it has protien. And every person who has been through med school nutrition class knows nutrition is only about vitamins, minerals, protiens, fats and carbs; foods are merely the delivery mechanisms for crude nutrient minimums. By the way...how's that hormone replacement therapy working for ya? What's that? You aren't on HRT? Bet me. If you're eating meat you buy at the grocery store...
So...what to do about it. Vitamin Shoppe? Nah. As pointed out, training lacks. There are some great things on their shelves, but without direction... Classic example, before they took it off the shelf, was Ephedra Herba. Mahuang is a chinese medicinal herb, next to never given by itself. Once it's discovered to have thermogenic properties, buncha dumb haulies isolate it, package it in megadoses, and sell the crap out of it until somebody dies. Milk thistle and dandelion have anti-inflamm effects in the liver. So what have we done? Ayup...isolate it, package it in megadoses, and sell the crap out of it. Let's ignore that it works best in small doses, paired with synergistic herbs. If I hear one more doltish twit say "Dongquai is a womans herb" while popping megadoses of it in isolation, I'm gonna explode.
I've been in the nutrition industry since 84. Trained with some of the best in Chinese herbalism, Functional Nutrition (using supplements to treat health issues), naturopathic health care, etc. I still cringe when I see people write stuff like, "my friend is a nurse, and she says.." or "my brother in law is a certified nutritionist, and he says...". The nurse gets the cliff notes version of standard nutrition training...what foods contain what nutrients, so they can prevent starvation; to their benefit, most get a semester...much more than a doctor. But the training is still to RDA standards...which BY DEFINITION, are the bare minimum required to prevent diseases of deficiency, as identified in the early part of last century...NOT promote health, or prevent early organ dysfunction in light of the nutritional challenges of our time. Got rickets? Eat citrus...that's the mentality in RDA recc's...nothing to do with, "Live a stressful life always on the go during a time filled with more environmental toxins than ever and a food chain made up of stuff that sustains without nurturing and are trying to reverse cardiovascular disease and prevent cancer?" Nutritionists with the A.A. from the JC are in a longer version of the same boat, trained to be skeptical about anything outside their field of training. Just like every other vertical field in healthcare.
They are not qualified to weigh in with an informed opinion. Well...maybe they are. I can buy tools at Home Depot, and have taken shop class in high school and tinkered in my garage, so I can offer an opinion -- of sorts -- on anything ranging from plumbing, to electricity, to architectural engineering. Will it be as informed an opinion as those offered by an actual electrician? An actual Architect?
In a very roundabout and frustrated way, I'm saying I agree with the "certified practitioner" approach. Despite hanging with most of the mucky-mucks in Nutritional Medicine, and having met and hung with hundreds if not thousands over the years in courses, trainings, diplomate programs, etc., there are maybe only 10 I trust to really know what the hell they are talking about; only 2 I refer people to if I can't get to them myself. Despite having taught classes on herbalism at TCM colleges, and despite having been trained by some of the best minds in TCM, having met (again) hundreds of educated practitioners along the way, there are maybe 3 I would trust with my life, going to them for assistance if diagnosed with a gnarly thing. And not just because I'm an a-hole.
You know what they call the class valedictorian out of Harvard med? Doctor. You know what they call the guy who graduated at the bottom of his class from some 3rd rate private med school overseas, who slept through his lectures and cheated on all of his exams to pass them? Doctor. Are they in the same class as practitioners, or is one more qualified than the other? We have a white-coat society, bred and trained to respect authority as authoritative, even when they aren't. Don't ask your MD about nutrition; he won't really know. Likewise, don't ask me about prescription meds, and their indications, contraindications, etc. I don't have the training or expereince there for my opinion to really matter. Don't ask a friend who's a nurse about nutrition for heart disease or reversing the effects of diabetes and rebuilding a damaged and overwrought pancreas; she won't know either, for the same reasons. Don't bother asking a nutritionist; the vast majority of them are just as lost, and enculturated to an allopathic model of health, so as to work in symbiosis with the allopathic care community (think a truly gifted nutrition guru prepared that hospital food for ya?).
There are whackjobs with no clue who have "MD" next to their names. There are sensible practritioners with lesser alphabets. Likewise, there are very skilled healers with 'MD" next to their names, and waaaaayyyyy more whackjobs with other letters next to theirs. Gawds...I'm in the crunchiest granola place in California, where every old hippie goes to die. Everybody is a freakin expert on everything; just ask them. I have to go to a networking lunch soon...where some woman who has ascended her notoriety as a sex coach (hard to believe looking at her, that she has any practical experience of her own), also offers her nutrition advice to a worried well woman wanting to drop a few pounds for a party. I sit with my mouth shut and cringe, because if I open it, it won't stop until I've told her to screw all the way off.
Nutrition and supplements are complicated; that's not the same thing as useless or inherently wasteful. Ask around for referrals, do your homework, read a lot, research both sides of an issue ("we like EFA's because..." versus "we think EFA's may be dangerous, because..."; look for their listed references, and go pull them. Become the expert on your own health, and on the stuff your putting in your body that effects your health).
Serious rant. But I won't apologize for it, because I take it seriously. Our bodies live and die at the cellular level. Every bite of food can act to either support your health, or diminish it. Supplements provide stuffs that the food chain does not...either at all, or in sufficient amounts. Avoid falling for logical fallacies, wherever they rear their ugly heads...either trying to sell you supplements, or trying to steer you away from them. Your health is yor life...try to go to work, love your spouse, hug your kids, or even clean your own bottom while laying there with a dozen tubes sticking out of you; you health is too important to be mentally lazy over.
Be well,
D.
