NUTRITIONAL SUPPLEMENTS AND NUTRITIONAL BALANCING

By Lawrence Wilson, MD

© August 2012, The Center For Development

              This article discusses important questions about nutritional supplements including:

Ø  Why take nutritional supplements?

Ø  Are they safe or at least low toxicity?

Ø  Are they better than drugs, in general?

Ø  Can they substitute for medical drugs and other medical treatments?

Ø  Can a person die from taking them?

Ø  Why does nutritional balancing not recommend most of them?

Ø  Why are they are needed in very precise dosages?

Ø  Why do we give them in doses, at times, that may exceed the recommended daily allowances or RDA for the nutrient?

Ø  Why do we use a hair analysis to recommend them?

Ø  Must all supplements be food-based and all-natural to work best?

Ø  Are there supplements that are best avoided?

Ø  Can a person just read about supplements and take the right ones?

Ø  What about the use of herbs, homeopathic remedies and other specialty products?

Ø  What about new supplement regulations, and do we need them?

WHY DOES EVERYONE NEED NUTRITIONAL SUPPLEMENTS?

Among the many reasons are:

1. Soil depletion has reduced the nutrient content of our food supply.  In most areas of the world, the land has been overfarmed and overgrazed.  In most of the world, manures and other mineral-rich products are not put back enough on the land.  This has depleted the soil quality.  In many other areas, the soil is just of low quality and is difficult to improve.  This produces food that is low in many minerals, in particular, but also low in vitamins, and hundreds of other nutrients found in food.

2. Hybrid crops provide lower-nutrient food. These are used everywhere today, even on organic farms.  They yield more food per acre, but the crops all have a much lower nutrient content than those grown 100 years ago.  This is well-documented in US Department of Agriculture statistics and elsewhere.
            For example, at least ten times as much rice or wheat are grown on the same land as was grown there 100 years ago.  But the land is not stocked with ten times the minerals, vitamins and other nutrients.  As a result, in part, today's wheat contains about 6% protein whereas 100 years ago it contained 12-14%.  Trace mineral levels are similarly much lower due to high-yield farming methods.

3. Modern fertilizers do not supply enough trace elements. One hundred years ago, manures were used extensively for fertilizer.  Today, superphosphate fertilizers have largely replaced manures.  These contain mainly nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus and are deficient in the trace elements.  This is sad, but true.  Our crops are more like a person on steroids – stimulated, but not as strong and safe.
            Superphosphates often act more as growth stimulants.  This has contributed greatly to depletion of the soil and crop minerals.  This includes organically grown food, although it is much better.

4. Modern use of chemical pesticides and herbicides all over the world make food somewhat toxic, and damage soil microorganisms.  Both of these also reduce the nutrition of the crops.  Soil microorganisms are needed to make minerals and other nutrients available to plants.  When these are damaged by Roundup, and hundreds of other toxic pesticides, insecticides and other chemicals put on crops, the soil micro-organisms do not function as well, and the nutrient content of the food becomes lower.

Also, our bodies require extra nutrients to process pesticide residues that remain inside the foods, so the pesticides that we must eat daily also reduce our nutritional status each and every day.  Many pesticides are deadly chemicals that severely tax the human system.  Some contain lead, arsenic and other toxic metals that slowly accumulate in the body.

Our laws currently allow sewage and even factory sludge to be sold as fertilizer that contains significant quantities of toxic metals.   These add greatly to our toxic metal burden and requires that we take in nutrients to help remove them from the body.

5. Long-distance transportation of many foods diminishes their nutritional content. As soon as a food is harvested, the levels of certain nutrients begin to diminish.  Today, many foods are grown thousands of miles from population centers.  The food may spend a week on a truck or a train before it reaches you.

In addition, some foods, especially fruits, must be sprayed, irradiated, or processed in other ways in order to survive the journey across the world.  For example, many people do not realize that much of our food comes from South America, Asia and China.  These are miles away and transportation is slow.  The food can grow moldy and you wouldn’t even know it.

6. Food processing often drastically reduces the nutrient content of common foods such as wheat flour, rice, dairy products and others.  For example, the refining of wheat to make white flour removes 80% of its magnesium, 70-80% of its zinc, 87% of its chromium, 88% of its manganese and 50% of its cobalt.

Similarly, refining sugar cane to make white sugar removes 99% of its magnesium and 93% of its chromium.  Polishing (refining) rice removes 75% of its zinc and chromium.  This is just the beginning of most food processing, however.

This is why fresh frozen vegetables, and freshly canned sardines are not that bad.  At least they are preserved quickly after harvesting or catching the fish, and the preservation method is not that terrible.  The best food, however, is freshly harvested or freshly killed and eaten quickly.

Pasteurization and homogenization of dairy products drastically reduces the bioavailability of calcium, phosphorus and some proteins in milk and other dairy products.  This is one of the worst insults to our food today.

7. Food additives often further deplete nutrients.  Thousands of artificial flavors, colors, dough conditioners, sweeteners, artificial sweeteners, stabilizers, flavor enhancers like MSG, emulsifiers, hardeners, softeners, chemical preservatives and other chemicals are added to most people’s food today.  While a few are harmless and may even increase the quality of the food by preserving it, many are toxic and many diminish the nutritional content of the food.

Among the worst are preservatives like BHA and BHT, artificial sweeteners like Aspartame, and perhaps EDTA, a chelating agent, that is added to some frozen vegetables to preserve the color of the vegetables.  The way it works is by removing vital minerals from the surface of the vegetable because when minerals oxidize, the color of the vegetable turns dark and ugly.  This is like tarnishing of silver.

8. Weak digestion and poor eating habits impair the absorption of nutrients.  Almosteveryone’s digestion is very weak today.  This is due to eating poor quality food, hybridized varieties of foods like wheat, and having to digest and handle so many refined foods and chemicals in the foods.  It is also due to low vitality, low digestive enzyme secretion, and imbalanced intestinal flora and intestinal infections like yeast that are extremely common.  This is quite a deadly combination.

As a result, most people do not absorb nutrients well at all.  This further impairs nutrient levels in the body, and increases nutritional needs.  This is why in nutritional balancing programs, everyone is given a digestive aid containing digestive enzymes such as pancreatin and ox bile.

9. Stressful and hurried lifestyles impair digestion and use up more nutrients.  These may include calcium, magnesium, zinc, chromium, manganese and many others.  Zinc begins to be eliminated from the body within minutes of a stress.  This is why many people have white spots on their fingernails, for example.  Stress adds to all the other causes of impaired nutrition above to make things much worse for most people today around the world.

Most people do not realize that stress always causes excessive sympathetic nervous system activity.  This not only uses up nutrients, as explained in the paragraph above.  It also reduces digestive strength and ability.  This, in turn, reduces nutrient absorption and utilization even further.

10. Chronic and acute infections and other illnesses most people have also depletes nutrients and increases nutritional needs.

11. Almost all babies are born deficient today.  In other words, most people need extra nutrition from the day they are born just to make up for deficiencies present at birth.  These are called congenital mineral and other deficiencies, which means present at birth.

It is critical to understand that nutrient deficiencies are passed from mother to child through the placenta.  Those who raise livestock all know this, but somehow medical doctors, nurses and dietitians do not.

12. The increased use of vaccines and medical drugs can drastically deplete a person’s nutrition.  This is especially true of any drug that impairs digestion or absorption of food such as antibiotics, anti-acids, acid-blockers, aspirin, Tylenol, Aleve, Excedrin and hundreds of other prescription and over-the-counter remedies.

13. Toxic chemicals and toxic metals in the air, water and elsewhere also deplete nutrients and increase the need for nutrition to combat them.  This is an enormous problem today.  Toxic chemicals are everywhere, in buildings, schools, homes, work places, urban air, and in almost all water supplies, even the purest ones.

14. Some medical procedures also drastically deplete nutrients.  These include surgeries of all types, and even some tests such as x-rays.  Surgeries cause stress and add more drugs to the system.  X-rays deplete B-complex vitamins and perhaps other nutrients such aszince.  This is known in medical circles, but nothing is done about it.

15. Special life situations require extra nutrition.  Medical science knows that many life situations require greater amounts of  nutrition, including:

·           All babies, children, the elderly and all athletes.

·           Anyone born with a birth defect may need additional nutrients.

·           Anyone who is ill, particularly those with a chronic illness.

·           Pregnant and lactating women.

·           Anyone who uses alcohol, refined sugar or recreational drugs such as marijuana.

·           Anyone following a vegetarian or other restricted diet for any reason such as weight loss or anything else.

·           Anyone under extra stress due to financial issues, a difficult job or marriage, or for any other reason.

Add up the numbers in these groups and you have most of the population!  Yet few health professionals are taught that all of these situations require extra nutrients beyond that which is available from only the highest quality food, eaten in a healthful manner.

16. Supplements can be used by everyone to protect against disease, eliminate deficiency states, prevent future illness, and balance the body chemistry.  These topics are discussed later in this article.

17. The nutritional standards set by governments around the world are much too low.  As a result, people do not make an effort to eat a higher nutrient diet.  This is a complex subject discussed in the section below.

FALLACIES OF THE RDAs AND MDRs 

Government bureaucrats meet periodically to decide the levels of the recommended daily allowances (RDA) or minimum daily requirements (MDRs) of common nutrients.  Their main concern is how much is needed to prevent deficiency diseases.  For example, a vitamin C deficiency causes scurvy, a vitamin A deficiency causes night blindness, and a vitamin B1 or thiamine deficiency can cause a horrible disease called pellagra.

            While this approach is okay as far as it goes, these recommendations have little to with optimum health.  One of every two Americans will contract cancer and 50% of the population by age 40 have a chronic illness.  In theory, most of these people meet or exceed the RDAs for nutrients.  So, perhaps the theory that the RDA is enough is flawed.  I would say it is fatally flawed.

            The problem is that the theory of the RDAs ignores many subtle aspects of human nutrition such as the effect of stress, chronic illness, pregnancy and other factors on one’s nutritional needs.  This is much harder to measure, so the bureaucrats just ignore it.  If they considered it, they would not suggest that everyone needs the same amount of any nutrient.

Also, the RDAs and MDRs are set up by dietitians, a group of people who are not trained in optimum health, and therefore who do not understand optimum health at all, whatsoever.  Most are ill themselves, in fact.  They are influenced by the drug industry, as are the medical doctors and the public health officials in most nations.   The drug industry wants a sick, malnourished population that will buy their toxic products.  Optimum nutrition is their worst nightmare, so it is not taught in medical schools, nursing schools, public health schools or dietetics schools.   It is also not taught to public school teachers or college-level education, as that would threaten the entire drug medicine paradigm.

The results of this oversight are monumental.  Here are just a few of them:

a) Pregnant women are allowed to basically starve themselves and their babies. 

b) Supplement labels cause panic because the amounts of nutrients the tablets contain are compared to the RDA on each supplement bottle.  This can cause alarm until one understands why the RDAs are inappropriate, much too low, and often irrelevent.

c) School lunch programs and other nutrition programs set up by the government to feed poor people, for example, do a terrible job because the standards are far too low.

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