Sixteen years ago, when I switched from vegetarianism to whole food plant-based nutrition, I consumed 13 vitamin and mineral pills daily, including multivitamins A, B complex, C, D, and calcium. I would travel from Mexico to Fort Lauderdale every six months to visit my mom. While there, I went to an established supplement company to stock up on the capsules and powders I thought I needed for optimal health. It cost me a small fortune, but the expense was worth it since I believed supplements were necessary.
At that time, I subscribed to the supplement company’s monthly magazine, which often had in-depth health articles. It took me five years to realize that the magazine’s main goal was to sell its pills and powders. The well-written articles focused on different diseases and the specific vitamins and minerals (micronutrients) that could treat, cure or reverse said conditions. The magazine never recommended foods that were especially rich in those micronutrients. Without fail, when I turned two or three pages after reading the article, there was a full-page ad promoting their products. As a result, I began doubting the motives of the magazine and the company it represented. Further research led me to question the efficacy of vitamin and mineral supplements as an alternative to real food.
Except for a vitamin B12 supplement, which doctors recommend for plant-based people, I decided to give up supplements completely, to see if my body would miss them. Today, at the age of 83, I can attest that 1) I didn’t need them, and 2) supplements should rarely substitute foods. Thinking the contrary is to do a disservice to the human body’s preference for real food.
Note: I want to clarify that I’m primarily referring to vitamin and mineral supplements, not effective herbal supplements (i.e., ginger, turmeric, etc.)
OUR BODY LOVES FOOD
Homo sapiens have always eaten real food throughout their 300,000 years of existence. That fact is also true of our great ape ancestors, who have been around for millions of years. The supplement industry emerged during the mid-1900s, and just like pharmaceuticals, there was a successful campaign to convince the public that we needed them to be healthy.
FLAWS WITHIN THE DRUG AND SUPPLEMENT INDUSTRIES
Drug Side Effects Instead of using medicinal plants to treat diseases, pharmaceutical drugs produced in laboratories try to mimic specific parts of medicinal plants to treat diseases. Because it’s not the whole plant, there are side effects that can be minor, serious, or even life-threatening. TV and magazine ads list the side effects at the bottom, in small print. Annually, 200,000+ people die from pharmaceutical drug side effects and overdose, making the drug industry the third leading cause of death after cardiovascular disease and cancer. This statistic does not include the many millions addicted to anti-depressants and painkillers.
Big Pharma and the Big Supplement are multi-billion dollar industries. Both are examples of reductionism, which emphasizes the part instead of the whole. Pharmaceutical drug ingredients are chemical copies of parts of the medicinal plant, not the whole plant. Supplement ingredients are the specific vitamins and minerals in the food instead of the whole food. From a holistic perspective, there is a fundamental flaw in supplements. For example, an apple is not merely the sum of its vitamins and minerals. It is nature’s colorful and flavorful way of presenting to our body what the whole apple contains and what the body needs at any specific moment.
The natural health community has also fallen prey to the ideology that chemicals ripped from their natural context are as good as or better than whole foods. Instead of synthesizing the presumed “active ingredients” from medicinal herbs, as done for prescription drugs (often with warnings of life-threatening side effects), supplement manufacturers seek to extract and bottle the active ingredients from foods known or believed to promote good health and healing. And just like prescription drugs, the active agents function imperfectly, incompletely, and unpredictably when divorced from the whole plant food from which they’re derived or synthesized.Dr. T. Colin Campbell, author of the Best Seller, “The China Study.”
The process of nutrition is profoundly holistic in that the way a body uses a particular nutrient depends on what other nutrients are ingested along with it. If we just take an isolated vitamin C pill, we miss out on the cast of “supporting characters” that may give vitamin C its potency. Even if we add many of these characters into the pill too, which some manufacturers have done with bioflavonoids, we are still assuming that whatever is in the apple and not in the pill is somehow not important.
FOODS RICH IN ESSENTIAL MICRONUTRIENTS FOR OPTIMAL HEALTH AND A ROBUST IMMUNE SYSTEM INCLUDE:
Vitamin A is found in orange and yellow fruits and veggies like carrots, sweet potatoes, pumpkin, and leafy greens.
Vitamin C is found in all plant foods, especially bell peppers, oranges, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, melons, and strawberries.
Vitamin E is highly concentrated in butternut squash, leafy greens, nuts, seeds, and broccoli.
B Vitamins can be obtained from plant-based sources such as citrus fruits, whole grains, beans, lentils, nuts and seeds, avocados, bananas, spinach, and broccoli.
Folate is abundant in leafy green vegetables like spinach, kale, broccoli, avocado, Brussels sprouts, oranges, and bananas.
Iron-rich foods are tofu, beans, lentils, cashews, dried fruit, chia seeds, pumpkin seeds, and chickpeas.
Zinc is found in oatmeal, tofu, cashews, sunflower seeds, peanuts, lentils, and chickpeas.
Selenium is found in Brazil nuts, which can provide more than 100% of your daily needs in just one nut (I eat one daily and think of it as a delicious chewable vitamin!), cereals, whole grains, and soy milk.
In conclusion, eating a diet that contains a wide variety of whole plant foods, including legumes, whole grains, nuts, seeds, fruits, and veggies, is the safest and most effective way to ensure that your body is getting the vitamins and minerals it requires for optimal health, a robust immune system, and longer lifespan.
To your health,
Michael
