Food vs. Supplementation

It seems like it should be easier to just take pills. Why bother to try to get the RDA of vitamins from food?

If we really understood the human body completely and knew what we needed to be well for our entire lifetimes, this would be acceptable. But, we don't. Medical science has not spent a lot of effort understanding nutrition - it's too focused on developing drugs for people who are already sick.

So, we must assume that we need to look to nature and the world we live in for guidance on what to eat. Think about what our ancestors must have eaten thousands of years ago. That is what our bodies are designed for. Science has identified a few dozens of essential nutrients. There is nothing that gurantees that there are not many more. They may be so common in our food that deficiency is rarely encountered. Common diseases whose cause is unknown may even be caused by these deficiencies. Perhaps we will find this out in the future.

Because of this, it seems like a good idea to get at least the RDAs of vitamins from food. There may be other vitamins that we need that are undiscovered. If we eat foods high in the vitamins that we know, we are likely to get any that we don't know. It's easy to get several times the RDA of the carotene form on vitamin A. It's also a simple matter to get significantly more than the RDA of C. With a varied diet that includes lots of lean protein sources, the RDA of the B vitamins is attainable even at a low calorie level.

To summarize, your diet should provide 2-3 times the RDA of vitamins A and C and 100% of B vitamins. No point in supplementing A - the research evidence does not support this. Hypersupplementing C does help you throw off infections and has been proven to be valuable. Animals other than apes make their own Vitamin C. They don't need to eat is at all. When they are stressed, their body makes a whole lot of it. So, you can copy your pets and take extra C when you are exposed to illness. Smokers need more C. Pollution raises your need for C. So, extra C makes sense. I take 500mg of C a day and will take 3-4 g of C when I am stressed. Hypersupplementation of B vitamins may be helpful to some people. Some people need more. Your body will just filter out extra B vitamins, so unless you have kidney problems, extra B won't hurt you. I take a B complex that provides 25x the RDA on average.

Minerals are better understood - there are only so many elements. Supplementing these are acceptable as an alternative. Minerals interact - they are electrolytes. So it is important not to get too much or too little of them. I recommend getting 100-200% of the RDA of all the minerals - no more and no less.