VITAMINS & MINERALS
How can you tell if you have a vitamin deficiency? Are there any easily recognizable signs or symptoms? Is there any reason why one should suspect that skin disorders, dry hair, poor eyesight, bruises or a sore mouth signify anything more than just a temporary or chronic condition that "runs in the family?"
Where to get the best info
...Food classifications are somewhat arbitrary, as nature provides no pure proteins or pure fats or pure sugars. Every food that grows contains proteins, carbohydrates, minerals and vitamins. Dates, bananas and potatoes contain a higher percentage of protein than mother's milk. The protein of green leaves, such as lettuce and celery, are of especially high biological value. The animal food industry, which has subsidized much of the food research that has been done, has the public well convinced that it can secure adequate proteins only by eating animal foods. That this is not so becomes apparent when we know that animals cannot synthesize amino acids from raw materials. If man eats a variety of natural foods that have not been processed and refined, he will secure adequate amino acids; indeed, amino acid deficiency is almost impossible on a normal diet.
VITAMIN SUPPLEMENTS
Antioxidants: An Antidote to Aging?
Vitamins are powerful substances. We need only microscopic amounts of them in our diets to stay healthy, but take away those teeny quantities and our bodies soon run into deep metabolic trouble.
DO YOU HAVE A VITAMIN DEFICIENCY?
There are in fact many recognizable signs of vitamin deficiency - either slight or very serious. You can tell whether or not you need more of one or another vitamin simply by observing yourself and your own health. We want to make one correction on the last sentence: it is doubtful if anyone was ever deficient in one or two vitamins. If you have even one symptom of deficiency in one vitamin, then it is almost certain that you are deficient in many of the others as well.
WHY WE NEED VITAMIN SUPPLEMENTS
The evidence that many people feel better and do better when they take vitamin supplements (along with a good diet) is so overwhelming that few who have investigated the subject with an open mind doubt it. Besides all that's been published, millions of people believe it as a result of personal experience.
Yet even those of us who are convinced of the wisdom of supplements must stop and wonder every once in a while why so many people seem to need them. Surely nature didn't design human beings to gulp down a handful of pills everyday in order to be healthy and strong. Nor is there any famine upon the land: What was sticking out is not ribs, but bellies. So why should it be that so many people do so much better with supplements? What's wrong with plain old food?
Vitamins are substances that exist in foods in minute quantities. The body used them as tools to enable it to appropriate foods. A number of vitamins have been isolated and most of them chemically duplicated in the laboratory. Now the effort is made to sell everybody vitamin pills as food supplements. The seeming necessity for these pills, which have proved toxic, arises out of the practice of processing, refining and cooking our foods.
The man who eats a varied diet of fruits, nuts, vegetables and other natural foods in their natural state will receive adequate vitamins. There are vitamins in everything that grows. If we do not cook and refine our foods, vitamin deficiency is pratically impossible.
When vitamins are extracted from their natural sources, they are impaired or destroyed. When alfalfa is cut and left in the field to dry, it loses seventy percent of its vitamin C in one day. When it is dried, powdered and pressed into pellets and bottled for sale, there is no vitamin C left in it. Other vitamins in the plant are also either entirely lost or greatly damaged by the drying and powdering process. All vitamins deteriorate in storage. When high prices are paid for such pills, far less vitamin is received than will be obtained from fresh fruits and raw vegetables at much less cost.
Nature has packed all fruits, nuts, leafy vegetables, cereals and legumes, with minerals. If foods are eaten in their unprocessed, unrefined and uncooked state, there is no possibility of mineral deficiency. Our dietary deficiencies grow largely out of a refined and processed diet. from the book 'Health for the Millions by Dr.H.M.Shelton
When to use supplements
While some professionals believe that supplements are simply not necessary, others believe quite the opposite. Personally, I think it is virtually impossible for a child or an adult to get all the nutrients needed from the modern (or even health-modified) North American diet without a little help from vitamin supplements. Years ago, when food production was on a small scale and we ate seasonal, and local food was grown without chemical fertilizers and pesticides, the argument against food additives was a lot stronger. Now, the damage we have done to the environment has left us with a food supply that is less than nutritionally perfect. In order to correct these imperfections, many professionals now recommend vitamin and mineral supplements.
Claudia Hoehne
How to use supplements
According to recent studies, antioxidant vitamins in produce and other foods may actually represent a modern-day "Fountain of Youth."
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SUPPLEMENTS FOR OPTIMAL HEALTH
Scientists originally discovered vitamins while examining deficiency diseases - devastating medical problems that occur when your diet lacks a particular vitamin. First, they pinpointed what foods could cure these diseases, and then they isolated the chemicals in the foods that were the sources of the cure.
The chemicals they discovered function in our bodies as coenzymes. That means they combine with the body's enzymes to promote the intimate processes that take place in each of the cells. They act as catalysts. They help vital chemical reactions take place that could not occur without their presence.
All vitamins are organic. In their natural state, they're all produced by plants or animals and they find their way into your body when you eat a plant or animal that contains them. But even though plants and some animals can make vitamins, human bodies generally can't. If you don't take in a vitamin in the food you eat or in a vitamin supplement, then you don't get it.
Quote from: The Complete Book of Vitamins by the Editors of Prevention Magazine.
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