We hear a lot these days about the pollution of the environment and how this affects food crops, and ultimately, our nutrition.

This argument about our polluted environment has been getting louder in the nutritional supplement industry. We are told that even if we eat the naturally grown foods in regular serving sizes, we cannot adequately nourish our bodies anymore from the foods grown in our polluted soils.

As I listened to a nutrition expert on a radio program recently, he said it would take about 10 servings of vegetables nowadays to provide the same amount of nutrients we could have obtained from a single serving back in the days before the industrial revolution.

I don't know about that, I cannot say how true that may be, but I might ask... How do you prove that food nutrients are insufficient when 80% of us are not eating adequate amounts of the required fruits and vegetables anyway?

Nutritional supplements from food extracts

You may have also heard the claim that food extracts that have been formulated as dietary supplements have many more benefits than the foods from which they were extracted. This must simply be a matter of ingredient concentration. But I also have to ask this...

How do we know that there isn't a negative effect of artificially inflating the concentrations of certain nutrients above the normal levels that nature has provided for us?

We also need to note that some of the nutrients in the supplements have been lost due to the processing. One notable example is with flax seed, from which flaxseed oil is made.

Flaxseed oil is rich in fatty acids, dietary fiber, protein, and physochemicals. Most people don't see flax as a source of dietary fat or protein, but they for the phytochemical content. Now, one of the phytochemicals is destroyed in the process of making flaxseed oil from the flax seeds. Ironically, it is the same ingredient that is said to have most of the cancer-inhibiting potential. But in the process of extracting the oil, we lose most of it.

Is long term use of highly concentrated nutrients safe?

Your multi-vitamin supplements may show the B12 concentration per serving as 833% of RDA. If you take Vitamin C supplements, each serving (or dosage) is several times your daily requirement. Why?

Removing any nutrient from nature's package makes it less effective than it would be in it's natural state. For example, an orange is more effective at delivering vitamin C than a concentrated vitamin C pill which lacks the many phytochemicals found in the natural orange.

Research is showing that "beta-carotene has been linked with increasing the risk of lung cancer in smokers; vitamin E has been associated with an increased risk of heart failure in people with vascular disease or diabetes."

What may be the long-term harm to people who, instead of eating their fruits and vegetables, rely on daily intake of multivitamin supplementations?

Only time will tell. But I don't want to be part of the answer 10 years from now. I'll continue to enjoy the stuff that comes from the ground from which I came, and to which I shall return. Nutritional supplementation may be good, but it cannot replace the intention of our Designer. Let's eat whole foods!

References: Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2006;(2):CD000254

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