Why should I take nutritional supplements when I eat a balanced diet?
Don’t I get all the nutrients I need from food?

Simply, No, and allow me to explain.

Questions like these often come up when people see the small bag of pills I take with every meal because it shocks
them to see a person of my age and health taking so many pills.  Pills are reserved for sick or “old” people.  Often they ask,“What are those?” and “Are you OK?”  After these questions I spend the next few minutes telling them that our food is filled with nutritional holes, covered in poisons, our bodies are under more stress than ever before, and I’m getting old.

Let me elaborate in this blog a single point.  Future blogs will cover the others.

“Our food is filled with nutritional holes.”

After reading through the Merck Manual and having, “Foods alone may provide suboptimal amounts of some
vitamins” burned into my brain I decided to look back in time at the nutritional value of food as recorded by the
United States Department of Agriculture.  So far the oldest data I could find was from 1975, the newest from 2007,
and then I compared them.  This US Government data recorded values of macronutrients (fats, protein, carbs),
vitamins (A, the B’s, etc), and minerals (Ca, etc) and now we can see a massive decline of our food in
precise data points.

Let us take broccoli for example. We all know broccoli is good for you, you should eat more of it, yet how
did it stand up over that 22 year period.  If we compare a pound of raw broccoli in 1975 to a pound of raw
broccoli in 2007, the below table is a summary what we get.

It looks like everything that we didn’t want to have happen did.  More carbs, more salt, less protein, less calcium,
and less of all the vitamins too.  A 75% loss of vitamin A is outrageous.

You may be asking yourself right now, “Really?”  Yes, our food has been destroyed over the last 25 years by farming
practices and processes, genetic engineering, picking and ripening times, etc. Now take a second and think about the
possible difference over the last 50 years or even the last 100 years. What was our food like back then? I’ll keep digging
and let you know what I find.

Dr. Garrett Wdowin, ND

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Tags: adding supplements, balanced diet, nutrients in food, nutrition, nutritional supplements, supplements

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 6th, 2009 at 4:05 pm and is filed under Things You Should Know by Dr. Garrett Wdowin. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.