Vitamins OR Superfoods? BOTH is best!....

Today's Post:  Thursday, 9-12-2013

A.  A recent study notes that unusually nutritious foods such as organic produce: blueberries or broccoli florets or pecans or carrots; or extra virgin olive oil or wild caught salmon; provide more and better health benefits than most people ever imagine.

THIS is totally correct!  In fact, it may be an understatement.  Real foods have so many kinds of nutrients and little known cofactors that it’s truly astounding – hundreds are in many foods!

B. It goes on to say that vitamin and mineral and other supplements are not needed or helpful since foods are so great.  It says the evidence for supplements is weak or mixed.  I haven’t read the original study yet but it also likely makes a case for not using larger doses of key vitamins and minerals.

THAT’s false!  In fact, it’s total crap and disinformation. It’s often said honestly from ignorance.  People who don’t know a subject can miss really valuable information in that subject area and this study does just that! They simply don’t know it exists. (Or they write as if they don’t.)

If you read how many things are prevented or improved by extra large doses of key vitamins and minerals and other supplements here or in some of the original studies, you know better! 

Sure, eating Superfoods helps and virtually never eating or drinking the many kinds of super damaging and heart attack starting foods & food ingredients are critically important as are getting regular moderate and vigorous exercise most days of ever week. 

But there ARE extra large doses of key vitamins and minerals and other supplements that prevent or stop things such as heart disease, migraines, many cancers, Alzheimer’s disease and more. 

The thing that is dangerous about publicizing studies like this one is that it lays the groundwork for preventing you from accessing these supplements.  That would be a public health and personal freedom disaster!

 And the drug companies also do seem to be paying for people to publish such things on supplements where the truth is the opposite of the conclusions listed to help remove safer and more effective and cheaper competition!

Adding the false statement to a valuable true statement is great for that purpose because it gives seeming credibility to their incorrect information which makes this USDA study a bit suspect.

C.  The people who have by far the best health do several things not just one! 

They do know and eat the Superfoods! 

They do know and take many of the most effective vitamins and minerals and other supplements also! 

They do know what foods and food ingredients are very harmful and fattening and go to some trouble to avoid them.  (Uninformed and poor people eat little else!  Which is one of several reasons our health care costs and disease rates are so high despite being preventable.)

And they do get both moderate exercise and quite vigorous exercise most days of every week.

As a result, people who do ALL these things age far more slowly and have better quality of life and not only live longer but have dramatically more healthy years of life.

Is this a trivial and small difference? 

NO!  People who do none of these things are lucky to have 30 years of healthy life once they become 18 and rarely have more than 50.  People who do them all tend to have from over 50 to over 80.  Twenty to over fifty more years of healthy life is NOT a trivial difference!

So when you read things like this, DO the things they show cause good health!

AND take with great suspicion any advice to not do things others find support good health!

1.  A few years ago, I happened to see the data on the health results of different diets and foods in China.

It was enormously valuable to me to see some of the data he found.

More recently I found his book:  Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition by T. Colin Campbell and Howard Jacobson (May 7, 2013), now available on Amazon, at my local bookstore.

He makes the same points as this study.  And, like the study, he does not know supplements at all or what they can do when you use the right vitamins and minerals in the higher dosages along with the best other supplements for various health purposes.

But I was able to read his description of how little vitamin C a whole apple is listed as having while at the same time, it’s been shown that eating a whole apple delivers the effect of taking 1500 mg of vitamin C!  That’s because of the hundreds of other nutrients and supporting co-factors that work with the vitamin C it does have!

That does clearly mean that besides avoiding the harmful and fattening foods and food ingredients, eating a wide variety of organic plant foods that are high in nutrition and animal foods wild caught or fed only their natural foods that are high in nutrition, you will have the very best health from the foods you eat.

As he so ably shows, you not only get the standard nutrients that we've known about for some time, you get far more, dramatically more, health benefits than you might expect by eating these real foods.

(One of the reasons to stop eating the very harmful and fattening foods and ingredients is to make room and funds available to eat MORE of those kinds of foods!)

And, the books by Dr Joel Fuhrman cover how eating a wide variety of organic plant foods that are high in nutrition in relation to the calories they contain helps you get unusually good nutrition from this high nutrient density diet, you can eat a lot and still be free of excess fat.

His recommended diet contains a vegan mix of salads with raw vegetables, cooked vegetables, and a daily serving of beans.

In fact, the volume of vegetables is so high, it’s a major undertaking to follow his diet.  You almost need to get a grocery bag or two of produce each day and then prepare food with it every day; and he leaves out the Superfoods from animal foods wild caught or fed only their natural foods and he leaves out the health OK oils due to their higher calorie content.

That said, every single kind of diet found to have health benefits has a large input from the kinds of vegetables he recommends.  And, all though he overdoes it for most people, eating more IS better and helps fat loss best.

The trick is to eat a set of vegetables that you prepare in batches when you can and then eat for several days or buy them pre-prepared.  And, you focus on the kinds with the most nutrition.

These include the cruciferous vegetables, those both red yellow or orange and those dark green that are high in carotenes, and artichokes.

The study and I also suggest eating wild caught fish high in omega 3 oils, tree nuts for those not allergic to them, and extra virgin olive oil – and the red wine in moderation that I and other health writers recommend.

The evidence is that you get more complete nutrition by doing this than eating only vegan foods, you get even greater health benefits of many different kinds, and most people find it dramatically easier to eat this way and continue to do so!

(Note that this is dated Thursday, 9-12 but got posted Friday, 9-13.  That’s because I was suddenly called away as I write this on Thurs, 9-12 before I finished it and posted it.)

2.  It is also extremely important to do as Colin Campbell and this study suggest NOT to do!

DO become knowledgable about the vitamins and minerals and other supplements that DO work and take them as you can afford or need to do.

Why get Alzeimer’s disease or a stroke or a cancer or a migraine or a heart attack you could have prevented?

To be sure, those who eat as this study and Dr Joel Furhman and Dr Dean Ornish and Colin Campbell -- AND I -- suggest and exercise and avoid tobacco and its smoke, WILL avoid such things better than people who do not.

But why stop there when you can do roughly twice as well with the right supplements!

By the way, these supplements, just like the super foods, have multiple health benefits.

It’s fun to take one for a protection it’s known to have and then learn it is also protecting you from other harms and illnesses too!

For example, I began taking curcumin supplements and eating curries containing the turmeric it comes from because there is solid evidence that it is one of the effective ways to prevent Alzheimer’s disease and may even help reverse or slow it in its early stages.

THEN I found out it also helps prevent many cancers and does so very strongly if you take it with black pepper!

THEN I found doing this was one of two things I was doing that caused a 25 point drop in my LDL cholesterol.

Another supplement that is becoming famous for this -- its multiple health benefits, is taking 3,000 to 5,000 or a bit more of vitamin D3 each day!

Doing this ALSO helps prevent all autoimmune diseases and helps keep your bones strong.

Like taking curcumin, it prevents Alzheimer’s disease and many cancers. 

Taking this much vitamin D3 also makes it less likely you’ll get colds or a case of the flu;

your flu shot will be more likely to work!, AND you’ll be less likely to get complications –

or die from them a study of deaths in a European flu epidemic found.

And taking this much vitamin D3 ALSO helps prevent all autoimmune diseases and helps

keep your bones strong.

Don’t let studies like this prevent you from accessing that kind of protection!