The Standard American Diet (SAD) often fails to supply the amount of useful nutrition we hope it would. Convenience seems to have taken the lead when it comes to getting food from the fields to our tables. Science and business have joined hands in altering food items so they will be more robust and less likely to spoil during storage and delivery. Shelf life trumps nutrition.
Bananas are picked before they’re ripe, as are many fruits. They look fine, taste okay, and can withstand the jostling they get when being transported from trees to our homes. Fresh bananas from the tree taste different than the ones we buy at the store.
Boxes and bags of processed plants and livestock line the store shelves, mostly in the center aisles, and will survive almost forever. Natural ingredients have been removed or chemically altered to, again, survive transportation and prolong storage.
Grocery store product is often colored and sprayed with substances to enhance appearance, along with preservatives, sugars, and non-nutritious oils. I once heard a seminar speaker report on the amount of dissolved solids in fresh produce. He had been collecting and measuring samples for several years and told us that the measured solids were more than 50% lower than 40 years ago. Nutrients are lower, but sugar levels remain high.
It is unlikely that anyone will put a stop to the harmful processing that is so common in the modern food industry.
Big Pharma stepped up to the plate (pun intended) around 1940. Miles Laboratories introduced the first One-A-Day vitamin (produced by the Bayer Corporation) and encouraged all of us to begin supplementing our food with a simple pill, every day. That practice might well be the dawn of modern medicine’s insistence on daily medications for life.
Once consumers agreed that they needed to supplement their diet with a pill. It was a short step to a full industry of supplements.
It has been demonstrated that individual supplements are actually necessary for good health – making up for the nutrients that are intentionally removed. B vitamins, Vitamin C, and minerals such as magnesium, gained in popularity. Some are produced in a laboratory, but are chemically identical to natural items. They cannot be patented, which diminishes interest from Big Pharma.
Doctors correctly recommend nutritional supplements and some sell them in their practice. Pharmacies long have been a local source of commercial supplements, and today there are retail outlets that specialize in vitamins. Supplementing is a good reaction to poorly nutritious food, but more is not always better. Too much, as always, is too much.
It was a simple task to improve on the once-daily idea to multiple doses per day, and a variety of natural extracts and chemicals. It isn’t uncommon for a supplementation devotee to swallow handfuls of capsules and tablets daily, sometimes accompanied by liquid, gummies, and other modern dosage forms.
The supplement industry often has been weighed on the scales and found wanting. (DN 5:27), but they have yet to be found guilty of anything more serious than profiting on a belief system that fails to be supported by scientific study. After all, there’s no money to be made studying something that can’t be patented.
Instead of gulping down dozes of supplements, is there something an average person can do to fill in the gap between what our food is and what we’d like it to be?
Unless we can grow our own food, there remains a need for quality multiple supplements. One product is Mitocore. It delivers more than 25 nutrients in each capsule. The bottle recommends four capsules daily but for many of us, one to two daily certainly should be helpful.
Instead of 25 products, Mitocore is a reasonable alternative. It’s available from many places, even Amazon. It’s a branded product by Ortho Molecular, a reputable supplement manufacturer. I do not hesitate to recommend it.
Larry Frieders is a pharmacist in Aurora who had a book published, The Undruggist: Book One, A Tale of Modern Apothecary and Wellness. He can be reached at thecompounder.com/ask-larry or www.facebook.com/thecompounder.