people who are
older, women of childbearing age, young children, people
with various illnesses and medical conditions – in fact,
most everyone but young adult males in excellent health who
eat a varied and adequate diet that includes all the food
groups in the right proportions. The FDA goes on to add:
However, supplements do not supply all of the nutrients and
other substances present in foods that are important to
health. We agree with the FDA that health supplements
are not a substitute for a healthy diet. Eating a broad
variety of foods in all of the food groups is essential to
your overall health. For many reasons, though, it’s nearly
impossible for most of us to derive all the nutrients that
we need for optimal health from diet alone. The fact is
that dozens of research studies conducted by various schools
of medicine and medical organizations have established both
the importance of various nutrients to your overall health –
and the inability of the average modern-day American diet to
meet those nutritional needs.
There are many reasons for
nutritional poverty of the modern diet. These include:
Modern farming methods that:
-
Strip the soil of nutrients
by overfarming it.
-
Use chemical pesticides
that add harmful chemicals to the diet.
-
Genetically engineer foods
to be aesthetically appealing while neglecting the nutrient
values that they should have.
Pollution of the earth, water
and sky that has:
-
Virtually eliminated
healthy fish from our diet because of mercury contamination.
-
Contaminated the
groundwater on from which our plants draw sustenance with
heavy metals and poisonous chemicals.
-
Filled the air with
pollutants that seep into the water, the earth and the
plants that breath it.
The manufacturing process of
most foods.
Our own tendency to seek
convenience above health.
Because of these reasons,
health supplements provide essential nutrients that our modern
diets are lacking. Take the example of fish oil. Since
the mid-1990s, numerous studies have pointed out and affirmed
the importance of the essential fatty acid omega 3 to our
health. Because omega 3 EFA is the major building block of all
of our body’s cells, even a small deficiency of omega 3 in our
diets has been implicated in illnesses and medical conditions
that range from diabetes to schizophrenia.
The only major sources of omega
3 in our modern diets are fatty fish. In order to get enough
omega 3, a person would have to eat fish at least three times a
week. Unfortunately, our environment makes eating that much
fish dangerous. Because of the levels of mercury in most
commercially available fish, eating salmon, tuna and other fatty
fish exposes us to unsafe levels of mercury.
The solution is to supplement
your diet with high grade fish oil, which contains omega 3 in
high amounts. Using fish oil – particularly emulsified fish
oil, which is more available and digested more easily by your
body – as a health supplement to your regular diet provides all
the omega 3 that your body needs to manufacture new cells and
repair old ones. For more details about fish oil supplements,
see Omega 3 Fish Oil.
Another
well-known health supplement that affects a wide range of
age-related illnesses is alpha lipoic acid, often abbreviated as
ALA. ALA is essential to cell functioning in our bodies,
including metabolism and producing energy. Researchers state
that most Americans get enough ALA in their diets to power their
bodily functions – but there’s more to alpha lipoic acid that
just the essential needs. Research conducted at medical
institutions and schools around the world has shown that when
there is an excess of ALA in the body – more than the amount
that’s absolutely needed to power basic functions – ALA
functions as an antioxidant, helping to prevent and even reverse
many of the diseases and conditions that we associate with
aging.
