Standard Process Vitamins

vitamins & supplements?

Hi does anyone think we have become obsessed with taking vitamins? I use to pop loads of supplements, but I think now they just were a waste of money, and more over maybe even created health issues. Is it that supplements in their concentrated form are too much, and that our metabolism is not designed to ingest such potent quantities ?

Public Comments

1. vitamins and supplements do help keep your body youthful as you age, the problem you are experiencing is most likely due to a mix of ingredients that work against each other (sometimes conflictions occur, and this is why I personally get sick if I take Centram and some other multi-vitamins). You should always take note how you feel after you take something or after you take something with something else. Also if your body doesn't want a supplement, it may be hard for you to swallow it eventhough it is a smaller capsule than the others (if so, stop taking it, the body is pretty smart in knowing what it doesn't want)
2. The sad truth to you vitamin pill poppers is that there is very little benefit in taking them. In our culture we get just about every thing the body needs from eating what we eat. Our food here in the west, even when we eat so called junk food, has a great deal of nutrients.Massive doses of vitamins and or supplements are really not beneficial at all, in fact can be quite dangerous. Let me give a few examples. Well known hamburger, has bread which contains vitamins and some fibre, meat equals protein and other vitamins and minerals, the salad that they put in it also contains vitamins and minerals. Take a bowl of chili, all the goodness of the beans and the meat both stuffed full of vitamins and minerals. The cornflakes that you had for breakfast, all the manufacturers fortify them.Now before this column is taken up by all the nutritionists out there trying to beat me up, I am not suggesting that you live on burgers, I am just giving examples of how well we eat in our society and if we eat a normal balanced diet, we get all we need from our food.
3. Despite what the skeptics like to say (we tend to hear it more often because they like to complain loudly), there is irrefutable scientific evidence that proper high quality nutritional supplements CAN WORK. And we're not talking small studies here - one study I know of included 88,000 femal nurses over a period of 26 years! On top of that it should be notes that the use of nutritional supplements has been recommeded in top medical journals, and in many countries some high quality nutritional supplements are even on the Physicians Desk Reference - which is a chart doctors use which lists all the medications they can prescribe! It is getting to the point now where anyone who has done even a small amount of due diligence cannot argue with the fact that nutritional supplements have their place amongst a healthy diet and active lifestyle. What I personally find incredible is the fact that if someone is having a sad-ish day, they can get a prescription for a mind altering drug - yet these same professionals who prescribe these things sometimes scoff at preventative medicines. They seem to prefer letting the problem get really bad before they care, and by that stage often the problems (such as heart disease, diabetes and stroke) are irreversable. Now that I've got that out, your questions: Yes it can be a waste of money if you buy poor quality products. But that applies to everything. Anything you can purchase on a supermarket shelf is fairly dubious - reason being that they are what is called FOOD STANDARD. Now that term means that what is on the outside of the bottle is what is in the pot. Great?? Well NO. What FOOD STANDARD means is that one of those pills might contain ALL the ingrediants, while other pills in the pot may have nothing in them. It's pretty simple - you get what you pay for. If what you are taking is not PHARMACEUTICAL STANDARD, then you are wasting your money. The other issue is mixing difference products - often if you take one product it means you can't adsorb something else, or if you only take one product it may not absorb without taking something else. An example is Magnesium and Calcium - neither is properly absorbed into the body without the other, and neither of them absorb quite right without Vit C. It sounds confusing - but the point is that if you take a good product with the right quantities then it can help your health. As for ingesting too much? Any good supplement should be designed so that an excess of any particular ingrediant should come straight out the other end. That is why in most countries you are not allowed to put Iron in supplements - because it is an ingrediant that can be fatal if you have Haemochromotosis. Anything you put in your mouth that you don't need shouldn't stick around in your body if it's not needed. If it is making you sick, then it's a poor quality product and it's no wonder you are having health problems. I have just read a book called "Dietary Supplements; Creating Expensive Urine? or A Key Addition To Modern Medicine?" which is written by a world reknown cardiologist and his wife who is a GP, which is enlightening reading. If anyone is interested feel free to drop me a line and I can point you in the right direction to get a copy, or any questions or comments drop me a line.