From the Express-News, “Vitamins might well have a downside, studies suggest”
and since everyone who lives in a city is breathing polluted air, studies say that you should stop breathing immediately!
Here we go again. Yes, the best way to get the nutrients you need is a healthy diet. The problem is that 95% of the American public does not have a healthy diet. Even those who think they do, fall well short of daily needs, especially if they are deficient, because our foods do not provide it to us. For example, if you were a child in the fifties, the produce you ate gave you 6-7 times the vitamins and minerals you would get from the same type of produce you would consume today. A multivitamin will never bridge that gap. Vitamin regimens should be customized specifically for an individual, based on age, diet, sex, genetic predisposition, etc. Blood, urine and genetic testing can give you a very exact road map to health your health, not some generalized character taking a “multi”.
Yes, vitamins can interfere with medical procedures, drugs and even other vitamins. For example, I would never recommend Vit E, copper and iron be taken together, unless free radical damage is your intent. That is why you seek out a credentialed professional for help. I would also never recommend taking the type of Vit E or even Vit A as it was used in the study that concluded that they increased health risks! The study designers were either ignorant of basic nutritional tenets, or had an agenda to promote.
And yes, if a person can honestly say their parents and grandparents died in their 80’s or 90’s without any health problems (sounds oxymoronic to me), they still need to supplement based on their personal genetic weaknesses and environment.
Doreen A. Lewis, DC, DACBN, DABCI