Food Supplements: Helpful or Harmful? Part Two


by Ron Garner - Date: 2006-11-30 - Word Count: 666 Share This!

The purpose of supplements is to compensate for nutritional deficiencies in the food we eat, or to correct deficiency conditions already in the body. True supplements are composed of whole food ingredients; they feed the body with balanced nutrients it can use to heal itself.

It is my belief that when the body has been starved of vital nutrients or has been abused from an intake of improper nutrition and toxic substances, supplements are needed to correct deficiencies. Many people take supplements of one form or another to ensure they are getting what may be deficient in the food they eat.

The business of supplements is a huge, multi-billion dollar industry, but not all supplements supply the life forces that the body needs to regenerate itself. Many vitamins sold in drugstores and even in healthfood stores are chemically derived, synthetic, and therefore do not contain the organic components required by the body to build health. In fact, they may actually contribute to vitamin and mineral imbalances.

When you buy vitamins or minerals, do you really know whether they are good for your body? Assuming that your body is deficient in certain vitamins, minerals, or enzymes, do you know whether your body can utilize the supplements you are buying to build health? Or, are they simply adding to the stress and toxic load the body must handle?

Natural Versus Synthetic

Supplements are not created equal! Natural vitamins heal. Synthetic vitamins stimulate, but do not heal. Dr. Royal Lee, who founded Standard Process Laboratories, notes that: Natural complexes differ from synthetic, crystalline vitamins in many ways:

1 They are colloidal, protein in nature, in the form of an enzyme or coenzyme.

2 The crystalline vitamin itself, in the natural product is in a critical combination and cannot be split off without destroying its biological activity. If separated, it must recombine with the other members of the complex before it can function as a nutrient.

3 The natural complex carries trace mineral activators, without which the vitamin fails as a biochemical catalyst.

4 If so-called, HIGH POTENCY crystalline vitamins are ingested, they must be put into proper combination, as a complex, before the vitamin function can be appreciated. Meanwhile, most (if not all) of the crystalline component is lost through the kidneys.

Natural complexes are ionically active, which is an extremely important factor for the absorbability of a nutrient. The smaller a nutrient is the more capability it has of entering into combination with other elements and forming the electrical matrix required to transfer energy to a cell.

Synthetic vitamins, due to their non-ionic structure, do not have this capability, nor are they complete complexes. Any food or vitamin must contain the appropriate live enzymes to be utilized by cells. Enzymes make transport of nutrients through cell walls possible. Live food comes complete with enzymes to assist with its digestion and assimilation.

Most vitamin and mineral supplements do not contain enzymes. A majority are produced or chemically processed in laboratories. Such mass-produced synthetic products are good for profit and shelf life, but they are stimulative, toxic, and detrimental to the body. They are unnatural and cannot be used by the body for health.

An example of a synthetic vitamin which is perpetrated as the real thing is ascorbic acid. The drug industry calls it vitamin C. Ascorbic acid is not vitamin C, but rather a fraction, the outside layer of the biologically utilizable vitamin C complex.

Likewise, alphatocopherol, which is sold as Vitamin E, is only part of the Vitamin E complex. As Richard Murray points out: – synthetic vitamins are not vitamins at all but synthesized Fractions of a vitamin complex – a mirror image duplication of just a portion of the real, biologically active and physiologically precise nutritional complex. There is no possible way that a fraction of a vitamin can be called a vitamin.

The analogy here is essentially the same as an automobile salesman handing you a wheel from a car and telling you the wheel is an automobile.


Related Tags: vitamins, herbal supplements, natural food, minerals, supplement, organic, enzymes, synthetic vitamins

Ron Garner, BEd, MSc, is the author of "Conscious Health - Choosing Natural Solutions for Optimum Health and Lifelong Vitality." Conscious Health takes the mystery out of how the body operates and how health problems can be reversed. To learn more visit: http://www.conscioushealth.ca Your Article Search Directory : Find in Articles

© The article above is copyrighted by it's author. You're allowed to distribute this work according to the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs license.
 

Recent articles in this category:



Most viewed articles in this category: