Think, Eat, Be Healthy

Why I Don’t Place Much Value In RDA’s(Recommended Daily Allowances)

Does anyone really believe that taking supplements to meet our "daily minimum requirements" is as good as eating real food?

Does anyone really believe that taking supplements to meet our “daily minimum requirements” is as good as eating real food?

I do not place much value on our government’s nutritional recommendations. Whether they are called RDA’s(recommended daily allowances) or MDR’s(minimum daily requirements) or some other alphabet combination, all of these guidelines are based on the premise that everyone must take in certain amounts of individual vitamins and minerals each day to maintain health. My opinion is that the government’s view of nutrition is wrong and implies easy health maintenance with vitamin and mineral supplements.

A study I saw a while back estimated the antioxidant effect of the vitamin C in an apple. The actual antioxidant effect of the apple turned out to be more than 250 times what the amount of vitamin C would account for. That 250x multiplier effect is provided by the synergy of all of the other vitamins, phytonutrients, and minerals in that apple acting together with the vitamin C. Our bodies need vitamin C from food because we cannot make it ourselves. But taking a vitamin C supplement in pill form leaves out all of those other important nutrients that do so much for our health.

Government guidelines for how much of each vitamin and mineral it is necessary to ingest every day lead to thinking that if those vitamins and minerals do not come from food that taking a vitamin pill will be just as good. Those same often repeated guidelines also lead people to believe that they need to carefully track what they eat every day to make sure they are getting enough of certain vitamins. Both of these ideas are nonsense.

This plate of fresh fruit might or might not contain enough vitamin C to satisfy our government but it will certainly satisfy our bodies.

This plate of fresh fruit might or might not contain enough vitamin C to satisfy our government but it will certainly satisfy our bodies.

Human nutrition is so complicated that no person or group of people has any clue how everything fits together to make us healthy. The chain of individual chemical reactions that need to take place between placing a bite of food into our mouths and the nutrients in that food killing a cancer cell or nourishing a kidney cell can be tens of thousands of steps long. Depending on the exact state, needs and health of our body when that food is eaten, any and every one of those tens of thousands of steps might result in three or four possible outcomes. Not only can no person understand and predict this kind of complexity, not even our fastest and largest computers can do it.

So the idea that our government can know how much of each major vitamin we should eat every day is absurd. The idea that our bodies would need the same amount of any vitamin or mineral two days in a row is absurd. The idea that taking a vitamin pill containing X amount of vitamin C will have the same effect on our health as eating a mango containing the same X amount of vitamin C is totally absurd.

We evolved to eat whole foods as provided to us by nature. This means fruits, vegetables, seeds, berries and roots the way they come off the plants. This means animal products from animals eating a natural diet. Supplements cannot take the place of whole foods and maintain health. Even supplements derived from whole foods lack the fiber and diversity of nutrients present in the food itself.

A wide variety of whole foods every day will take care of all of our nutritional needs.

A wide variety of whole foods every day will take care of all of our nutritional needs.

Please don’t trust the government to know what will keep you healthy. Please don’t trust doctors or scientists pushing co-enzyme Q10 or Ubiquitol or vitamin K with your health. New nutrients are being discovered by science every week and we have probably just begun to scratch the surface, and it seems like each new discovery becomes a new must-have supplement.

Well guess what? All of these newly discovered wonder nutrients are being discovered in plants and animals that we already eat! None of these magical compounds is “new”, they have been there and we have been eating them all along. We just did not know they were there. This is why we should only trust mother nature with our health. She really does know best. She designed us to stay healthy by eating the healhty whole food diet she provides for us.

Eating whole foods as provided by nature has kept us alive, healthy and reproducing future generations for hundreds of thousands of years. Nothing magically changed when we discovered the scientific process. Our problem with modern health and nutrition is that the scientists look at tiny pieces of the process, like individual vitamins or single chemical reactions, and make the mistake of applying that knowledge to the whole process. It is like watching a mechanic use stainless steel screws to install a fuel filter in a rocket and coming to the conclusion that you need nothing but a screwdriver and stainless steel screws to put a satellite into orbit. Health, nutrition and rockets just don’t work that way. They are too complicated, and need to be that complicated, to be so easily simplified.