The Fundamentals of Supplementals
I LOVE BROWSING IN HEALTH FOOD STORES.
I know. Weird, huh?
Turn me loose in one of those, and I’m like a kid in a candy shop.
I dig the good smells in there. Yeasty, earthy, vital smells. Whole grains and garden greens. Seeds and sprouts. Beans and nuts.
I love the sights in there, too. So many colors, so many interesting shapes, so many varieties of things. Big bins full of barley and bulgur and buckwheat. Crunchy cereals by the bag. Bright fruits and vegetables fresh from the field.
There’s always something new. Milk made from cashews! Sausage made from mushrooms! What will they come up with next?
I’ve been browsing in health food stores for my entire life. My Aunt Kay and Uncle Barney Matheson were pioneers in the business. They founded Full O’ Life Natural Foods Market and Restaurant more than fifty years ago in beautiful downtown Burbank.
And as mentioned earlier, I grew up just an hour away, in Loma Linda, where there is another trailblazing health food store, the Loma Linda Market, established in the 1930s.
So, you see, I’m a bit of an expert on the subject of health food stores, and I’ve noticed two big changes over the course of many decades, at least here in Southern California where I live.
First, there are many, many more of these stores than there used to be. And, second, there has been a major shift in what they sell.
When I was a kid, health food stores were more like grocery stores. They sold mostly food. They also sold vitamin, mineral, and herbal supplements, but these usually were confined to a shelf or two in a corner of the store.
Today, in a great number of health food stores, it’s the other way around. The supplements have taken over the place. They’re in the front and middle, where they can’t be missed. Vitamins and minerals and herbs by the thousands, in bottles and jars and boxes and bags, stocked on shelf after shelf, in aisle after aisle. It’s the fresh produce and other grocery items that are in the corners now. They’ve been squeezed to the perimeter, pushed to the side, to make room for all the supplements.
There are even stores, nowadays, that have done away with food altogether. Vitamins and minerals are all they sell. Pills, powders, and potions of every kind.
More than half of adult Americans (53 percent) take supplements, according to a 2011 report by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The Consumer Reports organization says the supplement industry has boomed in the last twenty-five years to become a $27 billion giant.
That’s a lot of money.
Out of curiosity, I visited one of the big chain health food stores near where I live, and I started doing the math as I explored the supplement aisles. Theoretically, how much would it cost me to buy one each of everything?
I didn’t get very far. I only made it down a fraction of one half of one aisle before I realized I would need a supercomputer in my head for this experiment. The dollar amount would be gigantic. It would be a figure too huge for my brain to manage. My wallet was getting nervous, too, even though this was purely an information-gathering exercise and not a spending spree.
I decided to try something a bit more practical. I visited my nearest Costco warehouse store, which has a big supplement department but carries only the basic, most popular, best-selling essentials. That’s what Costco does, masterfully. It edits everything down to a few easy choices. You don’t have to comparison shop between dozens of different brands of, say, ginkgo biloba (an herb taken for alertness and memory support). Costco has done it for you!
Here, I was able to conduct my experiment quite efficiently, though admittedly I still ended up with a case of sticker shock. I roamed up and down each aisle, keeping a mental tab of the price of everything from astaxanthin (for healthy skin) to zinc (for immune support).
I calculated that if I were to buy only one container of only one brand of each vitamin, mineral, and herbal supplement in the store, my bill would come to more than $700.
Yes, my eyes widened a bit, and I might have gulped once or twice, but I was in no danger of actually spending that kind of loot on that stuff.
But there are people who do. Millions of them. They go into stores that sell supplements and they spend hundreds, even thousands, of dollars.
Why?
Is it because they are health conscious, and already eating right, and exercising well, and they want to take pills as extra insurance to bolster their continuing perfect health?
I don’t think so. I suspect that in most cases these are people who are not eating right, and not exercising well, and they’re popping pills as a substitute for what they should be doing.
That’s right—they’re not supplementing, they’re substituting! They won’t take care of themselves, so they’re hoping that magic pills and potions will do it for them.
Good luck with that.
Here’s a better idea. Start eating the world’s best diet, consisting of plant-based whole foods, and you will not need to worry about vitamins and minerals. You’re covered. You’re supplied. You don’t need extras. You don’t need supplements.
Here’s what our hero, Dr. T. Colin Campbell, director of the China Study, has to say on this subject: “There now is ample evidence that, except perhaps for B12 and maybe vitamin D, taking vitamin supplements is, at minimum, a waste of money and, at worst, may actually cause harm.”
Wow, how about that! Dr. Campbell and I have just saved you hundreds of dollars! Maybe even thousands, depending on where you buy your supplements, and how many of them you buy, and how often.
But wait a minute. I don’t exactly want everyone to stop buying vitamins and minerals and herbs right now. Remember, I was reared around health food stores, and there always were jars and bottles of vitamins and minerals around the house. There are two I remember most fondly. One was vitamin C, which we all would start gobbling whenever we felt a cold coming on. Mind you, this was decades before Nobel Prize–winning chemist Linus Pauling popularized the idea in his 1970 book Vitamin C and the Common Cold. I have no idea why it took him so long to discover what my family had known forever! (I’ll have more to say about this in a later chapter, titled “Cure for the Common Cold.”)
My other favorite was vitamin E, which I admired more for its looks than its purpose. Those luminous golden orbs! I used to stare at the clear glass jar of them, and move the jar around in the sunlight to make the capsules gleam, then tilt the jar to make them roll and tumble like cascading jewels! It was mesmerizing.
I know. Weird, huh?
By the way, Dr. T. Colin Campbell doesn’t want you to stop taking supplements, either. Not all of them, anyway. Study his words again. He gives vitamin D a thumbs-up. And he gives vitamin B12 an even bigger thumbs-up.
Here’s the thing about vitamin B12, which benefits your brain and nervous system. It’s the only nutrient of its kind that is not abundantly supplied by a vegan diet. The way I have heard it explained is that plant foods once were rich with B12 but modern farming methods have overworked and stripped the soil of that vitamin.
Boy, oh boy, my grandfather would have had plenty to say about that!
Herbert C. White was a pioneer organic gardener who already was composting soil in the 1940s and then writing about it in the 1950s. He served as garden editor of Let’s Live magazine, a popular national health and fitness magazine. And one of the books he coauthored with Dr. H. E. Kirschner, Are You What You Eat? (1960), deals extensively with soil husbandry. He was of the zealous opinion that mankind was threatening itself with extinction through improper farming methods, soil neglect, and the use of pesticides.
He wrote, “It is a sad fact that our U.S. soils are becoming more and more deficient in minerals, and less and less fertile . . . What a tragedy that the majority of American farmers still condone practices that inhibit and destroy the LIVING soil. When will farmers WAKE UP to the FACTS OF LIFE? It’s later than we think!”
That’s my grandfather for you. Lots of capital letters and exclamation points.
And, in the same way that I now am writing about him in my book, he wrote about his grandmother in his book. Listen to him:
“For some seven years, as young lads, my twin brother Henry and I were privileged to act as helpers on Ellen G. White’s beautiful Napa Valley ranch in northern California. By the way, this grandmother of ours was a confirmed organic gardener. No chemical fertilizers were ever permitted on the Elmshaven dairy and fruit farm; and what is more, to my knowledge no poison sprays were ever used in the orchards or vegetable gardens. She always believed in cooperating with Nature instead of fighting her.”
One of the chapters in Are You What You Eat? is titled “How I Treat a Sick Tree.” My grandfather tells the story of how he saved an apple tree by correcting and feeding the soil around its roots. He undertook the challenge as a demonstration project for a series of classes he was teaching in 1954 in Washington, D.C.
The chapter includes “before” and “after” pictures. The tree looks scrawny and pathetic in the first photo, but in the second it is blooming in full glory, and there’s a beautiful woman standing next to it. My grandfather’s caption reads, “Our photograph shows my daughter Dorothy standing by the little tree just one year after treatment.”
Hey, that’s my mom!
OK, that’s enough of a detour down memory lane for now. Let’s get back to the subject of vitamins and minerals.
A vitamin B12 supplement is a smart choice for anyone, and a necessary choice for vegans. Having some vitamin D supplements around the house is a good idea, too. But trust me, if you’re eating right, your normal needs for most vitamins and minerals are supplied in full. You can stop worrying about whether you’re getting enough of this or enough of that. You don’t need to pop a lot of extra pills.
Now, if taking a simple multivitamin every day gives you a little shot of psychological insurance, by all means go ahead. It’s no worse than Popeye downing that extra can of spinach when he wants a boost. He obviously doesn’t need it, considering the fact that he eats spinach all the time, but there’s no harm in it, so why not? (Hopefully, he also is eating lots of other good veggies and fruits and nuts and whole grains to go with those greens!)
Here’s one more word of caution, though, on the subject of supplements. There are some that actually have been red-flagged as potentially dangerous, so you don’t want to be carefree about taking those. You see, the supplement industry is not federally regulated like the pharmaceutical industry. Products are not tested and product claims are not checked with the same level of oversight. This is a sore point for the Consumer Reports organization and other watchdog groups.
“There’s a false perception that supplements fall under the same regulatory umbrella as prescription drugs,” said Dr. Orly Avitzur, medical adviser for Consumer Reports, quoted in a 2011 CNN report. “That’s not the case. We really don’t know what’s inside.”
That’s why consumers are urged to take a buyer-beware approach to supplements, especially those few that have caused alarm about their potential adverse side effects or unsafe interactions with prescription medications. Some such supplements have even appeared on the radar of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which usually pays little attention to the industry.
Colloidal silver, for example, a mineral used by some people for immune support and protection against infection, can cause permanent skin discoloration, according to the FDA, which started warning against the supplement in October 2009. Unless you want to start looking like one of the blue aliens in the movie Avatar, you better be careful with that one.
Kava, an herb used by some to treat anxiety, has been linked to liver damage. It is banned in Canada and some European countries.
Lobelia, used for respiratory support, can cause unsafe changes in heartbeat and blood pressure, according to the FDA, which started warning against the herb in 1993.
Comfrey, used for centuries all over the world to treat a wide range of skin and internal disorders, has been linked in recent years with liver damage and cancer. The FDA took the unusual step of banning its sale for internal use starting in July 2001.
My grandfather REALLY would have jumped up and down and had something to say about that one! He was a big believer in the benefits of comfrey. In another of the books he co-wrote with Dr. H. E. Kirschner, Nature’s Healing Grasses (1960), comfrey appears in the starring role. One chapter is titled “Comfrey—The Healer,” another is titled “Comfrey—The Miracle Herb,” and a third is titled “A Leaf a Day Keeps Illness Away.”
Yikes!
We all know that conventional wisdom undergoes change over time. Information gets updated.
The best idea, as in all cases, is to use common sense when it comes to buying and using nutritional and dietary supplements. If you see a vitamin, mineral, or herbal supplement that is touted as a miracle cure for anything (or everything), be afraid, be very afraid. If it’s some pill or potion about which you know nothing, get some expert advice before you waste your good money and possibly your good health.
If you’re looking at the basic vitamins named after the first few letters of the alphabet, go ahead, you are probably in the clear. But if you’re looking at vitamins named after other letters of the alphabet, please report their existence immediately to health science authorities, who so far possess no knowledge of them.
Of course, that may change. As the supplement industry continues to grow and expand, we probably one day can expect to see vitamins named after every letter of the alphabet.
Vitamin Z, anyone? Yes, it protects you from zombie bites!
Yeah, right.
Remember this, above all else: Supplements are not substitutes for sound health practices.
“It’s a Band-Aid approach to think you can eat poorly and just take a vitamin and you’ll be equal to another person who eats well and exercises and takes care of their health and gets regular checkups,” said Dr. Avitzur, the Consumer Reports medical adviser, quoted by CNN. “There’s no substitute for a healthy lifestyle.”
I asked my brother Doug, the doctor, if he takes supplements. He told me he takes six, faithfully, every day: vitamin B-complex, vitamin C, vitamin D, vitamin E, a basic multivitamin, and zinc.
Now, let me visit my kitchen and see what’s on my own pill shelf. Yes, I have a pill shelf.
Hmm, right now I have saw palmetto (prostate health support), potassium (heart and kidneys), calcium (bones), vitamin B-complex (which includes vitamin B12), vitamin C, vitamin E, zinc and echinacea (both for immune support), a “green drink” powder mix, a new thing called garcinia cambogia (an exotic fruit extract in capsule form that is touted as a fat blocker), and some omega-3 fish oil.
Fish oil? That’s an old one. I didn’t know I still had it around. I need to throw it out and replace it with some good vegan flaxseed oil!
(I checked with my cousin-in-law, Clint Comstock, who is the vitamins and minerals expert at Full O’ Life Natural Foods in Burbank, and he said it was OK to make the switch. Fish oil is still his first choice, though.)
Here’s the thing with me. I don’t take any of this stuff every day. That’s why there are inconsistencies, even incongruities, to be found on my pill shelf. Why is there no vitamin D, for example, when there are all those other vitamins? Why is there crazy stuff like garcinia cambogia? Why is there old stuff like fish oil, which I don’t take at all anymore?
I’m not like my brother Doug, the doctor, who is consistent and wise. Obviously, he got the brains between the two of us.
Seriously, though, vitamin and mineral supplements are hit and miss with me. Mostly miss.
And that’s OK.
Like I said, all the vitamins and minerals our bodies need are adequately supplied by the foods we should be eating. And I definitely am not hit and miss about the foods I eat. No, I try never to miss a good meal!
But days, weeks, even months will go by and most of my pill shelf will go untouched. Then, on a whim, I’ll start taking one of everything, every day, for a while. Or maybe one of this and one of that. Every day. For a while.
And, if I hear about some new amazing thing on TV like garcinia cambogia, I’ll run out and buy a jar and try that every day. For a while. Then forget about it.
I guess I like having a few supplements around. It’s the way I grew up.
So, I buy them. I have them. I just hardly ever take them.
I know. Weird, huh?