Food Supplements - Heros, or Villains?Food supplements are vitamins, minerals, amino acids and some other chemical sub parts of food, added as separate ingredients to your food intake. Chopping food into chemical sub parts is, historically, relatively recent. So, to have you orientated to my perspective, consider that I hold the locomotive and steamship as modern innovations. Food supplements, vitamins, minerals, and amino acids, as separate entities, have only become available in what I call the modern era. To pin down the idea that, a right food supplement, here a food class, that when added to very inadequate diet, (one that leads to inevitable illness), to a diet that forestalls that illness,scurvy, consider this story. The setting of the story is before electricity was harnessed. The British, then, before refrigeration, were a great seafaring nation. As inveterate explorers they made long sea voyages. And, their sailors diet was mostly salt pork and no fresh fruit or vegetables when on board. And on long journeys, scurvy was a sailor's lot. Once it was established that adding limes to the sailor's diet could stall the scurvy scourge, it became law that a British ship stow limes before leaving port. And that, too, is how being English was to become being a "limey." The above situation demonstrates how adding a right food supplement, by present day inference, it was the vitamin C that imparted the significant health benefits. But, when someone goes on a fast weight loss diet with a low caloric intake per day, then does it make sense to add a gamut of vitamins and minerals, but within the recommended range for the size of the person. The body has a capacity to eliminate a moderate excess of vitamin intake. The moderate surplus of vitamins would lead to faster elimination, mostly via the kidneys, and some via the bowel, and some loss from metabolism. A prolonged exposure to surplus vitamin intake, with some vitamins, leads to metabolic adaptation. This is similar to drug addiction, were over time, a given dose has a weaker effect then it had at the outset. The body can also adapt conversely, were it absorbs, extracts, and conserves more efficiently, when there is scarcity of an ingredient. Can a food supplement be toxic? Believe it, or not - yes! In Principles Of Internal Medicine by Harrison et al the association of acute symptoms of drowsiness, irritability, severe headache, and vomiting, may occur after eating polar bear or seal liver. They link this reaction to the high vitamin A content in these organs. The same book incriminates vitamin D as toxic with excessive prolonged intake - even to becoming lethal. But in this case, no natural food is vitamin D toxic, rather it will only happen from excessive supplementation. Note, though, this, the sunshine vitamin, is generally under presented in natural food, and is commonly added to processed milk products. And, too, recent investigators submit that the old recommended daily intake of vitamin D for those 50 years and older is too low. In general the human body handles food supplements well. So adding extra vitamins, minerals, and amino acids, to an incomplete food choice, should be a health benefit. Yet the limit of metabolic capacity to handle excess can be exceeded. But, I consider that having the knowledge to plan your ideal variety of food for the day, and that the need to have the will and the budget to apply it, is a set up for some nutrient lack. And so, without ad hoc consultation, taking a multivitamin supplement and relaxing concern about whether you have all the essentials in your food that day, is good sense; in today's economy, and for many situations. Like do you easily lean on junk foods? Or, are you on a weight losing diet? Does your budget force you to cheap high caloric density foods and little of fruits and vegetables? In recent literature the benefit of vitamin C intake to a dosage many multiples of the recommended daily intake to prevent illness are made. It is deemed that high intake hastens recovery from colds, and viruses, without side effects. I will add this caution. A prolonged exposure to an abnormally high intake might lead to metabolic adaptation, and make the system more susceptible at below normal intake. Herbs are plants with qualities of a food, of a condiment, of a medicine, or/and even can be nocuous. Now you may be skilled in the use of them, or you may be curious about them. So, from either of the two positions, you might want to explore a site which suggests that
herbs do heal.
|
