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A Case for Supplements
I follow much of the dietary advice on our front page, in a neolithic lacto-ovo vegetarian kind of way, but I also take supplements. What could be farther from a wild, primitive, natural, ancestral diet than getting your nutrients in powders, capsules, and pills from factories and laboratories?
My reply is that the foods our ancestors ate were much richer in nutrients than those we eat today. Much of our modern diet is processed junk foods, with even supposedly healthy foods like granola and yogurt becoming yet another excuse for eating sugar--a far, pathetic cry from our ancestral diet.
Even today’s most natural foods, fruits and vegetables, differ from their ancestral forebears. Comparing apples to apples, the big, sweet things you see in supermarkets today don’t look much like their tiny wild ancestors. If you think of the same nutrients being diluted into a bigger fruit or vegetable, you’re not far from the truth.
Then there’s our soil. Most of our topsoil is gone, essential trace minerals have been leached away, and conventional fertilizers add only enough key minerals to make a big yield, not to make it nourishing. The USDA’s measures of nutrients in foods reflect this decline over the past 50 years.
You can argue whether our lives are more stressful than the lives of prehistoric hunter-gatherers, but clearly we live in a sea of environmental pollutants our ancestors never saw: heavy metals, pesticides, radiation, tens of thousands of synthetic chemicals, any of which might be combatted with higher levels of nutrients and phytochemicals.
The more I learn about food, the fewer calories I’m willing to waste on “foods” that don’t nourish. There are so many newly-discovered beneficial factors that only real foods can reasonably provide.
While I can’t say that science unequivocally supports taking vitamin supplements, that’s no surprise, considering the complexity of people, foods, environment and nutrients, to say nothing of science, money and politics.
So in the end, I bet on natural foods and supplements, using the best of primitive and modern that we can manage.
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