Are Vitamins Really Necessary?
How did our ancestors survive without supplements? They didn’t. Many people ask me if they really need supplements and isn’t all the nutrition we need in the food we eat already? My answer is always the same: No.
If you want to prevent ill health, create optimal health and a long life span, then it is vital to supplement your diet – you need that extra nutritional boost. Why? You can equate supplements for humans with that of fertilizer for plants. When you add water, sunlight and fertilizer, the plant thrives. The same principle applies with us – our bodies thrive with the optimal nutrition.
Supplements provide our cells with protection, repair, regeneration and support. Unfortunately, our modern lifestyle cannot deliver the nutrients our ancestors were once privy to..and that is a critical problem. We humans can survive on the worst diet known to man, devoid of any real nutrition, for a short time. Once we leave our 20s we are on our own. After around age 30 or 40, it is up to us, if we choose to live a life of optimal health – to add supplements.
The RDA of 30 IU for vitamin E – the basic amount necessary to stave off deficiency-related illness – is difficult to get from even the best food sources. But hold on: that is a very low dose and forget about creating optimal health. The Optimum Daily Allowance (ODA) is 400 IUs for vitamin E. So think about the challenge of meeting that requirement.
For example, to meet the ODA requirement of 400 IUs of vitamin E, you would have to eat 1.5 lbs of sunflower seeds each day, 33 lbs of spinach or 3 lbs of almonds. Mmmm… The average American lives into his 70s or so. There are those exceptions, the genetically gifted individual who, despite smoking two packs of cigarettes a day, living on alcohol and junk food, still lives a very long life and providing rationalizations for the rest of us.
By shoring up our nutrition and closing those gaps, we will indeed create optimal health and longevity. Combining a nutrient-dense diet along with supplementation will help to create a body that operates at peak performance.