Are Vitamins and Supplements Necessary?

Why take supplements?

Do you know the biggest factors for nutrient depletions are aging and side effects from medications? As you age you lose nutrients that help keep you young and healthy. When you take prescription medications and suffer side effects, this is due to one or more nutrients being depleted from your body. By eating a nutrient rich diet and taking some high quality supplementation daily, you will feel better and have better quality of life. 

Here at Science Based Wellness we always recommend getting your nutrients from the food you eat, but not everyone eats the best diet everyday. If you eat lots of vegetables and fruits, wouldn’t that be a good enough source for all the vitamins and minerals and nutrients you need every day?  Well, the answer is, “No”. It is primarily due to the quality of foods and the ways they are produced.  Our food has been grown over land that has been farmed for over 50 years. So, the quality and mineral density of the soil has been greatly diminished due to over-farming; in other words, we have turned over the topsoil too often for too many years. The quality and mineral density of the soil has also been diminished due to the chemicals, herbicides and pesticides that are commonly used, not to mention genetically altered crops. Studies have shown that vegetables and fruits have had significant decline in the amounts of proteins, calcium, phosphorous, iron, potassium, Vitamin B2 (riboflavin) and Vitamin C from 1950 to the present time. Declines have been measured as much as 37%. Some studies show that you would have to eat 8 oranges today to get the same amount of Vitamin C as our grandparents would have gotten from just eating one orange.

So, it appears obvious that nutritional supplements are necessary. In fact, in 2002 the Journal of the American Medical Association began advising that all adults take at least a multivitamin each day. This was a small beginning step in the right direction. There are several additional studies that indicate that the higher quality of foods our grandparents ate might be a major reason why that generation has less cancer, diabetes and autoimmune diseases than people born in the United States in the last 30 years. It is estimated that over 60 billion doses of supplements are taken every year in the United States. A recent study concluded that it did not find a single death due to vitamin supplements. In fact, the lack of proper supplementation is a far greater risk for poor health than the risk of taking too many supplements.

Several studies indicate the benefits of taking certain supplements such as reduced birth defects with Folic acid, reduced breast cancer and multiple sclerosis with Vitamin D just to name a few examples. There are literally thousands of other studies on the benefits of other vitamin and nutrient supplements that are easily found with a simple Google search.