Food Versus Supplements

In the interests of full disclosure, it should be stated up front that I take supplements. A lot of supplements. A whole big darned pile of supplements. I have also been known to sell supplements, having spent much of my 20s in the health food biz. I am manifestly not unbiased on the subject. On the other hand, being wildly opinionated has served me well so far in my writing career, so why should today be any different?

Years ago, in an online discussion, I mentioned that I take a kelp tablet daily to supply both iodine and trace minerals. Another member said that he preferred to simply use iodized salt, because he liked to get his nutrients from food, not from pills.

I found this mildly hilarious. Why? Because kelp is a food, a good whole food often found in Asian cuisine; it's just one I'm not fond of. That's why I swallow mine in pill form -- I don't have to taste it. On the other hand, the refined salt one buys at most grocery stores has had iodine added to it -- in other words, it's supplemented.

I feel the same mirth, albeit in a more acid form, when I see the ads for Total cereal. You know, the ones where they show you how many vitamin pills you'd have to ad to your Kashi Go Lean to get the same nutrition as Total? Of course, I deny that cereal of any sort is your best breakfast. But this ad is at least moderately deceptive. Why?

Because Total isn't some miracle cereal so brilliantly formulated that it gives you all those vitamins from natural sources. It's freakin' Wheaties with about a nickel's worth of synthetic vitamins sprayed on it. In other words, it's a crunchy vitamin pill. You'd get exactly the same effect from eating Wheaties and taking a cheap multivitamin.

Often it seems like supplements are added to really awful "foods" to convince people that they're really great stuff. Take Sunny Delight. (Actually, don't. Leave it on the grocer's shelf. Please.) Here's the ingredient list, straight off the Sunny D website:

WATER, HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP AND 2% OR LESS OF EACH OF THE FOLLOWING: CONCENTRATED JUICES (ORANGE, TANGERINE, APPLE, LIME, GRAPEFRUIT), CITRIC ACID, ASCORBIC ACID (VITAMIN C), THIAMIN HYDROCHLORIDE (VITAMIN B1), NATURAL FLAVORS, MODIFIED CORNSTARCH, CANOLA OIL, SODIUM CITRATE, CELLULOSE GUM, XANTHAN GUM, SODIUM HEXAMETAPHOSPHATE, SODIUM BENZOATE TO PROTECT FLAVOR, YELLOW #5, YELLOW #6.

In other words, it's sugar-water with a tiny amount of fruit juice added to it (and fruit juice is pretty much sugar-water, too.) They fortify it with two vitamins -- C and B1, also known as thiamine. Somehow this is supposed to miraculously transform high fructose corn syrup into health food. It does not.

(It's interesting to note that vitamin C and thiamine are the two vitamins listed as being most important for treating delirium tremens, aka "the DTs," aka severe alcohol withdrawal. I find myself wondering if the stuff was originally formulated to give drinkers a mixer that would let them drink harder and longer before their systems gave out, especially since when I first saw the stuff, a good thirty-odd years ago, it was in a liquor store. I didn't see it advertised for kids until years later.)

(Coincidentally, my single worst hangover ever, at the age of nineteen, was the aftermath of drinking Sunny D screwdrivers. Ugh. Thirty one years later, the pain is still vivid in my mind. That the binge was inspired by serious heartbreak didn't help matters any.)

I was deeply annoyed -- and wrote about it at the time -- when officialdom stated that low carbohydrate diets were dangerous for women of childbearing age, because by eliminating enriched baked goods women would lose America's most common source of folic acid, thus putting any child they might bear at increased risk of neural tube defects. This was wrong on so many levels it was hard to know where to start.

Grains are not naturally a good source of folic acid. Enriched, ie white flour, baked goods contain folic acid because it has been added to them in the "enriching" process. Therefore, in order for women to get all that folic acid, they would not just have to eat a pile of carbs, they would have to eat a pile of refined carbs, rather than the whole grains we've been told are so wonderful for us.

Furthermore, there are plenty of good low carb sources of folic acid, and most low carbers step up their consumption of exactly those sources. For example: Two slices of white bread contain 17 mcg of folic acid, or 4% of your daily requirement. If, instead of having a sandwich, you put your meat and cheese and such on a big bed of romaine -- say two cups worth -- you'll get 152 mcgs of folic acid, or 37% of your daily requirement. Similarly, 1 cup of cooked brown rice has just 8 mcg, or 2%, of your folic acid. 1 cup of "cauli-rice" has over 50 mcg.

But that's not the main point -- the main point is that there's no difference between eating the "enriched" white bread, and eating an equivalent amount of sugar plus taking a vitamin pill -- and not a very strong vitamin pill, at that. Why wouldn't you just take the vitamin pill? Where is the benefit in eating the junk food to get the added vitamins?

Indeed, I have not identified a single vitamin or mineral that is not available from low carb sources. I had this conversation a few weeks back with editors at my publisher. We were talking about the fact that despite clear evidence that tight carb restriction is by far the best dietary approach for diabetics, even the most recent diabetic cookbooks include recipes using those "healthy" whole grains and the like. They asked me "Is it fair to say that it's necessary because there are nutrients in whole grains you can't get any other way?" My answer was a flat-out "no." There are no nutrients in whole grains that cannot be obtained from lower carb sources.

So why do I take supplements? Several reasons. I am willing to believe that if in a less crowded and polluted world, you ate all fresh, organically grown vegetables, grass-fed meats from your own pasture, including the nutrient-rich organ meats, raw milk and raw milk cheese from grass-fed dairy cattle, eggs and meat from free-range chickens, plus whatever game you could hunt and fish caught wild in a local stream, wild local fruit, plenty of rich broth made from bones, and the like, while spending much of your time in the sun, you would have obtained all the nutrients you needed. Sadly, my life doesn't look like that, and I'm betting yours doesn't, either. (But think of the bright side -- hot showers and broadband internet!)

We live in a polluted world, under artificial lights. We eat food grown on depleted soil, flogged into bearing crops with artificial fertilizer. I've heard it argued that of course our soil must be adequate, or crops simply wouldn't grow, but that's simplistic: The nutrients needed to grow a tomato or head of broccoli are not identical to the nutrients needed to grow a healthy human being, and just because the plants can do without, say, magnesium or selenium doesn't mean that we can.

Our fruits and vegetables have largely been bred for qualities other than nutritional value -- appearance, uniform ripening time, thick skins to withstand shipping, and the like. Many crops are picked under-ripe, and never develop the full nutritional value they would have had if they'd ripened on the tree or the vine. They can take weeks to reach us.

Most of us eat a vastly smaller variety of foods than our ancestors. Among the biggest losses is the near-total rejection of organ meats, which have been treasured throughout human history as the nutritional treasure-troves they are. And the quality of the foods we do eat is questionable, even when we choose the best of it by eating low carb.

Too, our ancestors burned more calories than we do through physical work, walking, and spending the winter in homes that were not graced with central heating. This meant they likely ate more than we do -- and got not only more fat, protein, and carbs than we do, but more vitamins and minerals as well.

In short, many things argue against us getting all the micronutrients that were part of our evolutionary diet. I'd rather swallow some pills and get what my body needs than maintain some sort of academic purity.

I'm all in favor of improving the quality of the foods we eat. That Nice Boy I Married and I now have chickens in the backyard, and get super-fresh eggs on a daily basis. (As I write this TNBIM is building a chicken tractor -- a portable, bottomless chicken run that can be used to move the chickens to a fresh patch of grass each day, letting them get those nice greens -- and, I profoundly hope, letting them control the !@#$%^&! tick population.) We've got a vegetable garden growing. I've developed a relationship with a local small farm that produces superb grass-fed beef and lamb and pasture-fed pork. I just bought several tubs of chicken livers, which I adore, and which are insanely rich in vitamins.

Till, I'd rather be safe than sorry. I'll keep taking my supplements.

But I won't get them in the form of nutritionally fortified garbage.