Most people want the silver bullet. Be honest…don’t you? Wouldn’t you like to be able to eat whatever you want, whenever you want, however much you want and do whatever you would want to do, whenever you want to do it? And when all that indiscriminate behavior catches up to you, wouldn’t you love to have the one pill that made all those consequences just magically evaporate? Come on…you know you want it!
And so does everyone else. When people meet health challenges they are forever looking for the one thing that will fix everything. The newest high-tech drug or super-duper mindboggling laser surgery or medical device, the one super-magic-newest-discovered nutrient. So they go to the best-and-brightest-newest-tech-medical-doctor…and are offered the same five things that have been available for the last one hundred years of modern medical history:
- Being cut
- Being burned
- Inhibit a mechanism/symptom
- Block a mechanism/symptom
- Suppress a mechanism/symptom
Or, maybe they go to a natural health professional and are given the newest-most-therapeutically-potent nutritional supplement. That’s always what natural health professionals have to offer…the newest nutrient that science has shown to modify, modulate, support or enhance.
…Everyone ends up sounding the same!
Every health professional is going to say they have the best. How can you differentiate between one supplement over the other? One way of deciphering all the chatter is to go back to the basics of human health!
What does a body need to be healthy? The answer is simple…it needs real food!
What does a body need in order to repair itself, its tissues, organs and bone? The answer is simple…it needs real food!
What does a body need in order to keep your brain and heart healthy and its blood sugar stable? The answer is simple…it needs real food!
Now for a comparison, go to your cabinet and take a look at the multi-vitamin you got from the health food store, Whole-Foods, natural health professional, Sam’s, Wal-Mart, GNC or Walgreens. On the ingredients label does it list foods? Or does it list chemical names?
Let’s consider a few examples. Most vitamin C supplements will list ascorbic acid as their main ingredient. Ascorbic acid never appears by itself in real food. It appears with dozens of other co-factors, co-enzymes, bioflavonoids, rutein, and trace minerals. Together, these make up the vitamin c complex as God created it in food! Only man has fractionated a substance, and in his infinite knowledge, decides that this one factor is THE important factor.
What happens to the body when an ignorant, unsuspecting consumer ingests this-man-made fractionated product? For starters they could potentially give themselves blood sugar problems. Why? Ascorbic acid is very similar in molecular structure to glucose, and very, very rapidly is assimilated into the blood stream thereby increasing blood sugar with possible insulin surges. Over time this might create blood sugar instability.
Secondly, the other factors that would appear in food along with ascorbic acid are necessary to the body. It will seek the other nutrients out, even if it has to mobilize them from other tissue and create overall nutrient deficiency. YOU are mandating to the body that it must go through this metabolic dance of nutrients because you’re choosing to consume something that is incomplete, fractionated and likely synthetic. This is referred to as Nutritional Triage.
The second example is vitamin B12. Take a look at the multi-vitamin label. Is the chemical listed for B12 cyancobalamine? If so, then you have been ingesting a lab created synthetic product. Cyancobalamine is extracted from cyanide as in the substance used to create cyanide gas. Is that a food? Can we be sure of how the body actually responds to the foreign non-food substance?
Using these fractionated substances and claiming that they can heal the body at a foundational level is like buying only a steering wheel of a vehicle and claiming you have a car. No, you also need the body, engine, tires, electrical and fuel systems to have a complete car. So how can you take a fraction, a piece, of a food vitamin, even if it is from food, which is probably not the case, and claim that it’s all your body needs? It’s truly ludicrous!
Secret Insight into the Natural Health Community
Now listen up. I’m about to divulge to you little known information about the inner workings of the natural health community. This includes how nutrition practicing medical doctors, dieticians, nutritionists and most natural health professionals work with nutrition.
Here’s the secret…ninety percent of these professionals do not know what I have just told you about fractionated nutraceuticals as compared to whole food vitamin complexes! They will tell you that it makes no difference, or that “it’s not possible to get high enough potency from whole food supplements.” Well, gosh, God must have been awfully stupid to put the nutrients into food that way then!
You see, the nutrients that make up all the super-duper high potency supplement nutraceuticals that are used so often are only the chemical structures that science has discovered and somewhat understand what they do in the body!
Now a beet has over six hundred different chemicals plus all the thousands of synergistic reactions between all those chemicals. Science has discovered and partially understands about 20-30. Of course, it is those twenty or thirty that are “the most important” according to science! Sure, what about the other 570? Do you get the point?
On the flip side, it isn’t that nutraceuticals are bad. They have their place. But you have to understand their place in relation to the hundreds of other chemicals that make up vitamin complexes found in food. Here’s what each do, nutraceuticals and whole-food vitamin complexes in a nutshell:
Nutraceuticals:
- They move around the furniture.
In plain words nutraceuticals are useful in changing or modulating body chemistry. A specific, fractionated nutrient makes the body respond in a single, specific way. This is great if you have an acute situation that needs to change NOW! However, it doesn’t fix the problem. It modulates the problem.
Definition: MODULATE—to adjust or regulate the degree of.
So, with a nutraceutical we can adjust or regulate a headache, blood pressure, heart rate, thyroid hormones, serotonin and a myriad of other biochemical processes. They works very similarly to pharmaceuticals, only more safely. But it does NOTHING to ‘fix’ the mechanisms behind the symptom! To do that we need to…
Whole-Food Vitamin Complexes:
- Repair the house.
Whole-Food vitamins are the foundational building blocks of the body. They are what your body used to make and form you in the womb. They are what your body needs to keep repairing and regenerating your organs, glands, bones and other tissues to keep you, well, you! Whole-food vitamins in effect repair the environment better known as your body or your house, so to speak. Nutraceuticals can be used to move the furniture around and make your house more comfortable to live in.
Do you see how the two can work together beautifully? It’s not that one is bad and the other is good. It’s not that you need only one and never the other. It’s that you MUST have BOTH to create true Whole-Spectrum Health!
Unfortunately, nearly 100% of natural health professionals and more ‘natural’ thinking medical doctors use ONLY fractionated, often synthetic, nutraceuticals. Worse than that, they are UNAWARE of the difference between whole-food complexes and nutraceuticals. They do not understand the power and foundational value of whole-food complexes. Think about it…do you think that the body would have more ability to heal with only ONE synthetic ‘vitamin’ molecule or 600 different chemical complexes with tens of thousands of synergistic potentialities?
Why Do Many Natural Health Professionals Not Know or Understand the Differences Between Fractionated Vitamins and Whole-Food Complexes?
What health professionals are taught in medical and naturopathic universities is ONLY WHAT WILL HELP THEM PASS THE BOARDS! To learn anything additional, the professional must realize that something is missing and strike out on their own to learn what that might be. There is no university or textbook that teaches health professionals about using whole-food complexes in depth. It is usually learned over years of Continuing Education (CE) training through symposiums, seminars and conferences given by leading doctors in specific fields of whole-food complex use.
It is the unusual health professional that 1. realizes something is missing, 2. Is willing to reject the social pressure of going outside the norm in mainstream thinking, 3. and then is able to accurately identify what that ‘something’ is.
You can see why it is so rare!
So when you are considering the difference between typical supplements sold on store shelves or in health professionals inventories, keep in mind the true value and the differences between those and whole-food vitamin complexes. Ask yourself, am I looking for true whole-spectrum foundational health or just a temporary emergency Band-Aid? There are no silver bullets!
And, by the way, didn’t your mother tell you there were no quick fixes? Didn’t she tell you that you can only get good results with dedication and hard work? Don’t be too hard on yourself, though…she was looking for the silver bullet, too!
©Labron J Allen | All Rights Reserved.
