My Vitamins

Though I primarily eat a diet of whole, organically-grown foods, and I also take vitamins (I'm using the word "vitamins" here loosely to include all nutritional supplements, even though those nutritional supplements contain more than vitamins). I've learned a lot about nutrition and supplements over the years that I want to share with you.

Problems With Vitamins

For many years, I didn't take vitamins of any kind. Many years ago, when I took vitamins I would get painful rashes behind my knees and in my elbows after about two weeks of taking them. I had the idea that if I was eating whole organic food I was getting enough nutrition. And there were so many vitamin products and so many claims that it was just too confusing. So I took nothing.

I also learned that most of the vitamins on the market are made by pharmeceautical companies. Almost all of the distributors of individual vitamin products buy their raw ingredients from the same giant multinational corporations, which produce them according to international standards. In most cases these supplements are artificial and synthetic. Even most "natural" vitamins on the market today are either fortified (a very small amount of low-potency natural vitamins mixed with high-potency synthetic vitamins) or are synthetic vitamins in a very small amount of natural base (the label will say something like "In a natural base containing...)

Even though many people claim that natural and synthetic supplements are chemically identical, natural supplements do have molecular, biological, and electromagnetic differences that produce greater levels of biological activity and are therefore better utilized by the body than synthetic forms.

The only truly natural vitamins are those that come from foods. They are available in nutritional supplements as highly nutritious conecentrated foods, powdered concentrates of foods and herbs with the moisture removed, and isolated component of foods.

Do we need vitamins?

As I said, for many years I thought that since I was eating whole organic foods that I was getting enough nutrition. But even with organic foods--which have more nutrition that non-organic foods due to the fertility of the soil--the nutrition needed by our bodies to sustain health in a stressful and polluted world is more than most of us can eat!

I read an interesting article--which came to me just as I started writing this--about a Chinese doctor who treats cancer, heart disease and diabetes with simple, readily available foods. But these are not the foods we eat every day. The healing foods are particular fruits, vegetables, herbs and seeds that are readily available, but not common in American diets. And the healing part of these foods is the phytochemicals, which are contiained in the fibers of the foods. So you need to chew each bite 40 times (or put the foods into a very high-powered blender) to release the phytochemicals. And you need to eat a greater volume of these foods than any of us eat in a normal diet. To regulate my blood sugar, the recommendation is 3-4 cucumbers a day. Possible, but this is not my normal diet (I might eat a half of a cucumber in a salad, but not a whole one--I've been eating 1 whole cucumber a day since I read this, and I noticed an improvement in my blood sugar right away).

Proper nutrition is needed to build and repair the body and sustain all its functions optimally. If our bodies are not functioning optimally, or we have an illness, we can be sure that one contributing factor is lack of sufficient nutrition.

So my conclusion is, considering the quality of food we eat today and the state of the world we live in, most of us DO need more nutrition that our normal diet provides.

The Need for Vitamins is Completely Individual

The most important thing I have learned about nutritional supplements is that the need of a body for nutrients is highly individual, the result of factors that can include age, environment, stress, gender, and overall body condition. Even an individual body has different needs for nutrition in a single lifetime.

I've found that I've achieved the best results from having a professional determine the nutrients my body needs. My own body has had many years of non-optimal function due to chemical exposures, stress, and poor nutrition (even though my diet was natural and more nutrititous than average). And so my body needs "healing" amounts of nutrition at the moment, rather than "maintenance" amounts.

I have had the best success with Dr. Jeanette Birnbach at Nutritional Healing Center in Tampa, Florida. She uses a very specialized advanced form of muscle testing called Nutrition Response Testing (NRT).

Muscle testing (also called applied kinesiology) was discovered in the 1960s by Dr. George Goodheart, a chiropractor. He found that one could communicate with a body to find out what was going on with it through asking a question of the body and then noting changes in muscle response (often experienced by the person being tested as making the muscle "strong" or "weak"). Since Dr. Goodheart's discovery, a lot of different people have used muscle testing and have created many different variations on and applications of the basic technique.

NRT was developed by Dr. Freddie Ulan, also a chiropractor, with the purpose of getting to the root cause of body problems in fastest manner possible. The technique was designed to evaluate which organs in the body are functioning optimatally or not, prioritize those findings, and get to the root cause of body problems by discovering nutritional deficiencies. Then those deficiences are remedied with supplements.

Dr. Jen says, "The beauty of NRT is that we get to the core problem. Obvious signs and symptoms don't necessarily indicate the real problem. When people are treated for a symptom, the treatment doesn't actually treat the cause of the problem. It's the equivalant of hearing a smoke alarm and ripping out the batteries rather than finding the fire. Medications and pain killers turn off the alarm--we find the fire and put it out.

"People think they are healthy if they have no symptoms, but there may be underlying problems that need to be addressed. There are at least 41 serious illnesses--including cancer--that don't have symptoms until the end stages. So the sooner we can identify and treat these illnesses, the better. The focus of health care needs to shift to prevention. And proper nutrition, specific nutrirents chosen to support what the different organs and structures in the body need, is good prevention. All the vitamins and minerals are necessary building blocks for the body, but then when certain parts of the body aren't functioning optimally, they need the proper nutritional support to correct the deficiency. Ideally, good nutrition should be used for prevention, instead of waiting until your body gets sick and then seeking nutritional help. I think of myself as a prevention doctor."

I also often muscle-test my own body at home and I've found that my results are often the same as Dr. Jen's. In fact, just last week I intuited I didn't need to take any more of certain supplements and confirmed my intuition with muscle testing. Then when I went to Dr. Jen, she confirmed each of my muscle tests were correct. But I've had a lot of muscle testing and a lot of practice. Usually I will test myself if I have a question at home and then go confirm it with her. Like I was reading an article about bee pollen the other day and I thought "That sounds good!" but then I muscle-tested it and got that my body didn't need it. On the other hand, I got a positive to take on a nutritional product to help balance my blood sugar (see below) and I was right on that, too. So I have a lot of confidence now in my own muscle testing, but still like to check in with her as my body is healing.

After my sucess with taking the right nutrients in the right amounts that my body needed at specific times, my recommendation is to not waste your money on buying supplements without learning first how to determine what your body needs, and beware of advertisements for supplements that claim that "everyone" should take this supplement. I recommend finding a very good practitioner and getting some professional recommendations before trying to figure it out yourself. You can spend a lot of money and get very little benefit if you are taking the wrong supplements for your body.

I've found that there is a wide variation in the ability of practitioners to correctly use muscle testing to determine needed nutrients. I found it was worth trying different practitioners until I found one who could correctly and effectively determine the nutrients my body needed, which I determined by seeing an improvement in my health.

The Vitamins I Take

Dr. Jen uses NRT to test for a variety of supplements made by different companies. Most of the supplements she recommends for me are made by Standard Process. This brand is very well regarded and has been recommended to me by many other health professionals. These are sold only through health care professionals who can monitor their use. The supplements are not sold on their website, but you can call 1-800-558-8740 or email info@standardprocess.com to be referred to a health professional in your area who can assess your need and provide these supplements to you (many chiropractors recommend and sell them). Some websites sell them online, but they do so in violation of their license agreement.

The difference between Standard Process and most other supplements I've taken is purity and potency. They really make a change in my body that I can feel. Many of their whole food ingredients are grown organically on company-owned farmland and then processed utilizing exclusive low-temperature drying equipment to preserve the maximum nutrients of the whole foods. The company was founded in 1929 by Dr. Royal Lee, a dentist who made a connection between nutrition and tooth decay way back in 1923, showing the necessity of vitamins in the diet. You can see the whole process of making these supplements on their website.

There are also other companies that make organically-grown whole food supplements sold online and in natural food stores.

I also take a nutritional product called Cinnergen--a blend of natural amino acids, vitamins, enzymes, minerals and trace minerals to bioflavonoids, antioxidants and other nutrients in proportion and form optimal for the body's use to normalize blood sugar (if you want to buy this product, don't buy it on the website...you'll save $15 per bottle at The Vitamin Shoppe).

Whole Food Supplements and Whole Foods

Even though I've been eating a better than average diet for a number of years, the amount of nutrition my body was getting from those foods wasn't enough to maintain the level of healing my body needed and health I wanted to maintain.

Whole food supplements are actually whole foods, like eating a whole beet or a whole carrot, but dehydrated and compacted. They are not like synthetic vitamins where only a handful of isolated vitamins are included. Whole food supplements contain the full spectrum of nutrients found in whole foods in the same combinations and proportions.

I can see myself continuing to include whole food supplements as part of my ongoing diet, as actual foods. My body feels so much better when it gets the nutrition it needs.