Should you take Your Vitamins this Morning?

PS – From Gwyneth Paltrow to Alex Jones of Info Wars, it seems like everyone is promising that vitamins— and their creepy alter ego, supplements—can soothe what ails us. Supplements are now a multi-billion-dollar industry that many say will continue to grow. But we’re not getting any healthier. Last year, U.S. life expectancy declined for the first time since 1993. How did we become a vitamin and supplement obsessed society, and why isn’t that keeping us from getting sick?

Did you take your multivitamin this morning? What about eating your fortified cereal? You could also go with some Milk, Juice, Bread or even Eggs! I mean you need to get your vitamins and minerals somewhere, their essential to….well LIFE! How the hell did humans survive before this Fortified Era?

You may be wondering what fortified foods actually are, and that’s a good place to start! By definition, Fortification or Enrichment is the process of adding micronutrients (essential trace elements and vitamins) to food. Ohh, so it basically takes regular old food and makes it super-food, Nice!  For shits and giggles lets take a deeper look. Fortification is the addition of essential micronutrients to a food irrespective of whether the nutrients were originally in the food before processing or not, the main objective being to improve the nutritional quality of the food supply, whereas enrichment is defined as “synonymous with fortification and refers to the addition of micronutrients to a food which are lost during processing“.

So how did we get to the point where we needed to add essential micronutirents to our foods? Well…

The WHO(World Health Organization) and FAO, among many other nationally recognized organizations, have recognized that there are over 2 billion people worldwide who suffer from a variety of micronutrient deficiencies. In 1992, 159 countries pledged at the FAO/WHO International Conference on Nutrition to make efforts to help combat these issues of micronutrient deficiencies, highlighting the importance of decreasing the number of those with iodine, vitamin A, and iron deficiencies.

I bet your thinking  – Don’t a lot of these “fortified”food have all the micronutrients we need in them naturally?  YES and NO

Then shouldn’t  eating a balanced diet be enough to give our body what it needs? Ummmm Sorta, It depends on your definition of balanced. See, the typical foods that you find between the produce and frozen foods in your local grocery store (usually in the middle aisles) go through extreme processing that strip them of much of their natural goodness. Why would food producers do this? Well, money of course. By mixing and matching ingredients at their processing plants they’re able to create a very tasty product that will keep consumers coming back for more. The results being the mouth-watering treats you find in cardboard boxes and plastic bags with a convenient shelf life of months to years. That’s a grand slam for food companies, but to cover their butt’s they fortify their food with synthetic vitamins so there’s no “UN-healthy”finger pointing going on.

Worried that you aren’t getting your micronutrient fix from your foods? Don’t be, the $120+ Billion supplement market has got you covered. The troubling thing is, without it an individual who consumes a typical western diet may be in trouble:

If it weren’t for synthetic vitamins, we would not be able to eat the way we today without getting horrible vitamin deficiencies. When were first able to synthesize vitamins in the 20s, 30s, and 40s, that really changed the kind of products that we were able to make. You had the processed food industry really start to take off, combined with this ability to put back nutrients that the processing had removed.

The key to answering our “How did we ever survive before the Fortified Era” question is simple. By consuming FOOD! From NATURE! Shocking right, if you focus on eating real food (usually from the ground) that you can touch you’ll get all the micronutrients you need. And It’ll be natural, rather then a lab derived mega servings in pill form factor. Just think of this:

When you’ve got a houseplant and you know that it needs water to survive, you may pour a gallon of water on it thinking it will just use what it needs and the rest will just pour out of the bottom of the pot. But the houseplant’s roots can get rotten, or they could grow a fungus, or there could be some other harm that’s caused by the excess water.

More times then not, supplements servings are 1000%+ of the daily recommended value. That means the majority of your vitamin C is going straight down the drain.

People say Americans have the most expensive urine in the world, because we take all of these vitamins and it’s no problem—we’re just peeing them out. But a couple of years ago, a woman killed herself by drinking too much water. If you can kill yourself drinking water, that’s a warning that just because you need something in a certain amount doesn’t mean that you can keep taking it at infinitum, or that it will do something good for you. It’s possible that we’re triggering diseases that take a long time to develop, but that are a result of being saturated with vitamins all of the time. 

Excess of anything can come with some extra unwanted baggage. Aim for getting you micro’s the natural route, anytime you can bypass taking a little oval shaped supplement the better(check this out if you wanna see what happens after you take a pill), consult your Doctor before making any changes. Take some time to understand what foods are nutrient dense and incorporate them into your diets, here are a few:

• Salmon
• Kale
• Seaweed
• Potatoes
• Blueberries
• Eggs
• Chocolate(Cocoa).

Not too bad right!