I have received a few questions lately about various supplements and which are the best to take. My general stance on supplementation is that it’s not needed… but let me elaborate:
Supplementation implies that you have a void in your basic diet that needs to be filled. It is a solution to a symptom, and not a cause.
Nutrition is at the foundation of health and well being, and every culture in the world already knows the secret to good health: You are what you eat!There is little room for argument surrounding the fact that your body can only repair and fuel your body with the food that you are feeding it. If you are feeding yourself refined, modified, denatured, and otherwise chemically altered variations of food, then how do you expect your body to perform? To use an analogy, would you pour dirty gas into your car and expect it to perform at an optimal level? Probably not.
To restate what I have said in earlier posts, food should not be broken down into micronutrients. There is a popular trend in the media right now to tout the latest magic bullet pill, vitamin, or antioxidant as the cure to X health risk. The problem with this approach is that our place in nature is a part of a larger system. Our genome didn’t evolve to eat the extracted vitamin C from citrus fruits, or isolate whey protein from milk, or iron pills, we evolved to eat the WHOLE FRUIT, and drink WHOLE MILK, and eat WHOLE VEGETABLES… seeing a trend here?
The three macronutrients of protein, carbohydrate, and fat are the building blocks of human life. Keeping your food in the rawest form you can before digestion ensures that you are getting as much nutrition as you can from the food you eat. Excessive heating, processing, and nutrient isolation removes much of the digestive enzymes from food that helps your body process and break down these foods into useful compounds. Without these enzymes, many foods get treated by the digestive system as a threat and trigger a stress response.
Supplements often lack many of the chemical components that allow the body to use them properly. To compensate for this, most supplements increase the amount of raw product you have you ingest to absorb a significant amount of whatever nutrient you are supplementing for. This practice can often lead to allergies caused by repetitive exposure to compounds that agitate the digestive system.
If you feel that you need to supplement your diet with a protein source, or vitamin, you should probably step back and take a look at where your real food diet is failing. A paleo based diet of meat, vegetable, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch and no sugar, combined with proper proportions for your body type, should be providing all of the macronutrients, and consequently all of the micronutrients that you need to thrive.
Related Topics
Tags: carbohydrates, Diet, fat, food, Health, milk, Nutrition, paleo, protein, supplements
