Clients ask me on a daily basis what I think about vitamin supplementation.

This is a massive topic. There are plenty who can provide education on the science of vitamins–where the ingredients are sourced, how they’re made, and how they work on a molecular level. There are also many philosophical points to supplementation. I’ll deflect to this article http://chetday.com/bvitamins.html, which spotlights b-vitamins, for a brief pros-and-cons.

So I’ll start with a few general statements, and then move on to the important stuff.

After all, I’m more interested in how we can make simple changes to live healthy lives than hashing out this decades-old debate!

So, 1) vitamins are inferior to how nature offers them up in the form of food, 2) vitamin supplements are toxic, and 3) vitamins have helped people in weakened states build back up again and recover from sickness.

1)      What you get from a food the way nature offers it up will always be superior to a vitamin. It’s fresh, your body recognizes and knows how to make sense of it, and it arrives in the perfect proportion. Many vitamins and minerals work synergistically with one other or need other nutrients present in the right amount to be utilized. Vitamins taken in pill form are often too little a quantity to be effective, so great a quantity so as to be toxic, or too much in isolation from their nutrient friends to be absorbed. As mentioned, it’s a huge topic!

2)      Vitamins are generally pretty toxic. Supplement companies, in the business of “nutrition,” can get away with building their vitamins from interesting materials under the guise that they’re toting something good for us. Vitamins are typically made from inferior ingredients, and even their encasings can be poisonous. Many gel caps are made from soy and cottonseed oils, which are always refined, and must undergo chemical processes to make them solid, into synthetic polymers. Synthetic polymers include materials like nylon, silicon, and plastics and make up commonly found items like pipes and tubing and food packaging. Not the most nutritious source of vitamins! Most vitamins also contain funky additives and fillers, such as magnesium stearate, which as one of my teachers, Paul Pitchford, says, destroys many of the body’s key metabolic functions. Finally, many vitamins contain gluten, dairy, soy, and other allergens, making further trouble for folks with food sensitivities.

3)      Vitamins, in very specific instances, may be helpful. This last point may sound contradictory, but I don’t believe anything in life is all good or bad, including our personal aspirations towards health and how we plan to get there. In countless instances, high-dose nutritional therapies, even in these inferior, potentially-toxic forms, have helped millions of people reclaim their lives. I used to be a huge fan of vitamins, and felt like they helped me recover from years of nutritional deficiency due to gluten intolerance. But I don’t need them anymore.

So what’s the alternative to vitamins, and how can we give ourselves the extra nutritional boost? Stay tuned for Vitamins, Part 2, where I speak to this. Thanks!