People walk into my office every day and ask me questions about supplements.  In nearly every case, they are referring to synthetic supplements made from chemicals.  Some of them are even made with coal tar.  Synthetic supplements are also very incomplete.  What is typically sold as vitamin E is a synthetic version of one part of an eight part molecule and is not beneficial.  In fact, it can even be harmful and trick your body into not absorbing the vitamin E obtained from foods.   There is a similar situation with vitamin C.  Ascorbic acid is once again a synthetic part of a molecule with eight different parts.  It’s like eating an egg shell instead of the egg inside.

Research is most often done on foods containing certain vitamins and minerals.  The supplements made from chemicals are in no way equivalent to foods.

In our clinic, we have whole food supplements.  With Standard Process, you are essentially eating foods that have been turned into capsules and tablets.  I recently recommended beets to a patient.  I told her she would not need to buy a supplement if she would eat fresh beets including the leaves on a daily basis.  She declined to eat fresh beets, which would have been the best choice, and decided to take tablets made from beets.

     Over the past year or so, vitamin D has been in the news a lot, and both true and false claims have been made. Vitamin D is essential for bone health, and there has been research done about its role in your immune system, depression and many other things.  It was not originally known that vitamin D is actually a hormone, not a vitamin.  Therefore, vitamin D is incorrectly named.  I have seen research that suggests that most people are vitamin D deficient, and vitamin D levels are routinely checked in medical offices.  However, the Institute of Medicine reports that most people have enough vitamin D.  I believe somewhere in the middle lies the truth.  There are several things to consider when deciding whether or not to use a supplement.  First, you should do everything possible to spend time in the sun.  In order to avoid harmful effects of the sun, get your sun before 11:00 A.M. and after 3:00 P.M. Gradually work your way into it; start with just five or ten minutes in the sun, and slowly increase your exposure over time.  Also, be careful not to get sunburned.  It is a little trickier to get enough sunlight in some parts of the world, in the winter, if you are older or if you have dark skin.  Just a reminder, light through a window will not work!

Too much vitamin D can give you hypervitaminosis D.  More often than not, people actually have a deficiency in vitamin F, not vitamin D.  Vitamin D takes calcium from the gut and puts it into the bloodstream, while vitamin F puts calcium into your tissues.  Supplementing vitamin D will not help you if you have a vitamin F deficiency.  Primarily found in oils, vitamin F is very important.  Science often refers to vitamin F as polyunsaturated fatty acids.  We need linolenic and arachidonic acids from fat in our bodies.  Vitamin F is not found in vegetable oil; it is found only in fat meat and butter.  When we eat processed foods, margarine, shortening and unhealthy, unusable fats and oils, this keeps our bodies from using vitamin D.  There is a lot of misinformation about fats, carbs and food.  The best rule of thumb is to not eat man-made and heavily processed foods.  People have eaten butter, eggs and animal fat for thousands of years.  Cancer, obesity, diabetes and many other degenerative diseases have become epidemic in modern times eating heavily processed food and unnatural diets.