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

Now that we know our food is “filled with nutritional holes” let’s evaluate the next point.

Our food is “… covered in poisons,”

If a person buys 100% organic foods and eats only at organic restaurants, then their food isn’t really covered with poisons.  With that said you are still exposed to a certain amount of pesticides, fungicides, herbicides, etc because you are alive and breathing.  Drive around the Phoenix valley, or wherever you live, and one will find farm land that uses these toxic chemicals.  Therefore, they go into the air and we all get to share in the exposure.

Now that we know everyone is exposed, what does that mean?  It means your body has to deal with these chemicals and the damage they inflict on a daily basis.  This exposure/damage demands cellular energy, detoxification pathways, and repair mechanisms to name a few processes in the body.  All of these processes require co-factors or vitamins, minerals, amino acids, etc to function which we just pointed out are extremely decreased in our food.  If there are less of these co-factors available for the body, then there is more damage to the body because the toxins can’t be properly and timely cleared.

Next point

“… our bodies are under more stress than ever before, and I’m getting old.”

The latter part of this statement can be argued with depending on how old you are.  Yet, I am getting older and as we age we continue to fight the battle against many issues including entropy, a vial opponent.  As we age hormone levels decrease, functionality of enzyme pathways decrease, etc, etc.  I’m just trying to support the system to work as well as it can, as long as it can.

The former section of this statement is in reference to both physical and emotional stress.  For physical stress let’s think about the environmental toxins we are exposed to everyday through our food, water, and air.  We live in Phoenix and are being exposed to all these chemicals swirling in this beautiful Valley of the Sun.  Physical stress can also be sugary or refined foods that spike blood sugars and serum insulin levels, forcing your liver, pancreas, and kidneys to work overtime.  For emotional stress let’s think of our busy lifestyles, stress from work, stress from the financial markets, and on and on.

Why is this constant stress a problem?  It is a problem because our bodies were not designed to handle constant or chronic stress.  The body was designed to be exposed to stress, deal with it, and return to a generally relaxed state.  Short bursts of stress, remember the “Fight or Flight” response from 8^th grade biology?  With the combination of all these modern stressors our bodies hardly ever, or never, get to return to the relaxed state and this slow burning constant stress eventually leads to a “burn out” or chronic disease.

That is the short version of why I personally take nutritional supplements with every meal!