Why Dietary Supplements are Needed

Part I. Introduction

Is it necessary to take supplements, or would a so-called balanced diet suffice? In an ideal world, with ideal food and no pollution, the diet would probably suffice. But we are very, very far from those ideal conditions in today's world, and a diet without supplements is not sufficient to maintain an optimal level of health.

Why?

There are many reasons, but the two major ones are bad food quality, and a denatured environment.

Part II. Food Quality

Introduction of Agriculture

There is good reason to assume that very early prehistoric man was living on edible fruits, roots and parts of plants; and this still is what our organism is shaped for. Practically nothing in our physiology has changed since. This food grew wild, which means it had "chosen" the place most suitable for its growth and it existed in an environment with a considerable biodiversity. That is to say, there were many different species in the area (including animals), all co-existing. The soil and these species were well adapted and suited to each other. The circulation of nutrients among them was well balanced.

The Neolithic revolution, the introduction of agriculture, was in many ways a human progress, since it made man less vulnerable to environmental changes; and, not least, it made it possible to increase the amount of available food, that is energy. That was a crucial factor for human survival then. Yet the rise in quantity lowered the quality of food. This was a production mainly of carbohydrates, to some extent of fat and protein - at the cost of vitamins and minerals. The nutritional balance of the soil was quickly destroyed by the cultivation of only one species in an area; sometimes on soil not at all suitable for a specific crop, but made useful by manipulation, useful for producing calories, a high quantity of energy.

Regularly shifting crop in a certain area is better than never shifting, but it will only slightly slow down destruction, not stop it. Neither will fertilisers, which - consciously spread - essentially are a part of artificial manipulation. In the long run, they will just make everything worse. To a large extent, the more or less global human deficiency of the mineral magnesium is caused by long term use of artificial fertilisers.

This decline of the agricultural soil and the foodstuffs being produced there is slow and gradual, and it is still going on.

The Use of Fire

Another great progress in human life was the use of fire. It made it possible to heat foodstuffs. This made it possible to eat things that could not be eaten before. This, too, was an improvement in access to food, that is energy! It was easier to avoid direct starvation and get enough carbohydrates, fats and proteins. But here, too, the quality sank. Minerals, with some exceptions, did manage quite well, but for many vitamins it was a catastrophe.

An interesting fact about heated food is that it gives you digestive leucocytosis, an increase of the number of leucocytes, white blood cells. Your body is defending itself against a danger: alien substance! This does not happen when you eat fresh/raw foodstuffs.

Strangely the body can be cheated; if you begin with fresh food and eat a cooked dish afterwards, there is no leucocytosis. There is no reason to believe this procedure to be of benefit. It is abuse and certainly harms us in some way.

Animal Food

On the animal side, the Neolithic revolution led to the holding of cattle and other domestic animals, for the purpose of food production. Here we can apply the same reasoning as with crops. Their lives are unnatural and their meat is of lower quality than the meat of animals which grow up in the wild. So the step from hunting to breeding is analogous to the step from collecting edible wild fruits/roots/etc. to cultivation. A rise in energy production at the expense of essential nutrients.

I am not condemning the development as such, it has probably been necessary for survival at those stages in history as well as for progress in many areas of human life. Until quite recently, getting enough energy was a major problem. So from a survival point-of-view, the priority has probably been the right. Nevertheless, the development to gradually lower quality foodstuffs started as early as in prehistoric times!

What the contemporary use of chemicals, pesticides, medical drugs, hormones and all sorts of unclean substances used in the production is doing to the quality of food right now, both vegetable and animal, is another matter. We will soon look at what that means to our need of vitamins.

Storage And Preservation

Storage is another destructive factor. All fresh fruit are losing vitamins every second after having been picked from the plants. The same goes for all crops. An orange, for instance, is losing vitamin C from the moment it is picked. Long storage and time-consuming transportation hardly preserves any nutritional value.

Fruit are often picked before they are ripe, to ripen afterwards during storage or transportation. A fruit that is ripening after being separated from the plant and root will never develop full nutritional value!

All forms of preservation take their toll on nutrients, especially vitamins. Which method of preservation is the best and least harmful choice depends on the foodstuff we deal with, and what we mainly want to preserve in it. No general rule applies.

Refining

White sugar, white meal, and white rice are all refined. Most or all vitamins and minerals and other essential nutrients have been removed, and the remainder is more or less pure energy. Of these three, sugar is the closest to that "purity", even if it can be processed into another form which is even more refined, pure alcohol.

Food Quality - Consequences

If you pick a ripe orange from a wild tree in the ideal world we initially said that we do not have, and eat it instantly - then it contains all the nutrients, in perfect combination, to make you digest and metabolise it. If anything is missing, the body must take it from some other source. It is the same with all foodstuffs!

We have seen above that there are many, many reasons for something to be missing. Indeed, for all practical purposes it is impossible today to find food where nothing is missing.

So what will happen? If you eat sugar, your body needs a lot of nutrients, mainly B-vitamins and minerals to metabolise that. It takes minerals from your bones and your teeth, vitamins from other processes and tasks for which they are needed. The same goes for whatever you eat, something is taken from other places or tasks. You degenerate and build the base for degenerative disease!

Part III. Environment

Pollution

The world is full of pollution. Air, water, soil, all of it is polluted. Food production adds further toxins to the foods. There is no clean environment left on earth.

Vitamins, and to some extent minerals, are directly connected to our ability to detoxify ourselves, to cleanse our bodies from all poisons; and they protect us from damage caused by radiation and magnetic fields.

Our need for certain nutrients, especially vitamins, can be hundreds of times higher than it would be in the ideal world, on occasion even thousands of times.

Just as an illustration, let us look at an example: vitamin C. One of the functions of this vitamin is to serve as fuel for liver detoxification. The liver is the main detoxifying organ and carries most of the burden of cleansing out toxic material. But there is one problem, when the C-vitamin is exhausted, detoxification stops. Yet, if there is only enough of the vitamin, the liver's detoxifying ability seems to be almost limitless. Even a heavy heroin addict (and believe me, that is a way to poison the body on a grand scale) can cleanse out the resultant toxins if given very high doses of vitamin C. In such a case the need can be 100.000 mg or more (injected). But the main point is, it works!

Note that such high doses require to be balanced by certain other nutrients, and should in no way be taken without the supervision of a competent physician.

Oxygen

Due to inner and outer pollution, we get far less oxygen to our cells than we are made for and need.

More effective breathing is one way to compensate at least some of it, and most people are not breathing in an optimal way. Still this would be just a marginal improvement. Our cells permanently suffer from a deficiency of oxygen, and they are harmed by that! So how can we protect them? Vitamins help. In this case, particularly vitamin E.

Part IV. Conclusion about Supplements

The quality of our food is bad and becoming worse all the time. There is good reason to try to eat as well as possible, but it is still very insufficient. We will get permanent deficiencies, gradually building up the foundation for degenerative disease. To combat that we need supplements.

The environment is becoming worse and worse. The toxic level of everything is rising. Supplements can help us to compensate this continually growing need of certain nutrients.

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