What's the best way to get your nutrition?

As we have already seen, the human body requires over a hundred different known nutrients to stay healthy. If you are lacking in any one of them you will get what a doctor calls a disease. What's more, doctors and scientists don't know what they don't know, and neither do we.

What we do know is, for example, there are over 10,000 different natural compounds in a leaf of spinach, and only less than 200 have been categorized and studied. When you fully understand the implications of this, you will begin to understand that your nutrition must come from your food. And any supplementation you take must come from whole food sources. Add to this that cooking destroys many (most) nutrients and you'll see why disease can be prevalent.

You need all those nutrients whether they've been discovered or not!

Doctors can tell you that if you eat a balanced diet you would have no need of supplements, but they can't even tell you what a balanced diet consists of! No one can because no one knows! However we DO know that the food we eat has only a fraction of the nutrients they possessed one generation ago. Every five years the government issues a new version of the food pyramid which tells you supposedly the best diet for health. If they knew what was best, why would they have to change it every five years? Here's a better plan for eating done by the Harvard School of Public Health which doesn't have to please the special interest groups!

We've already discussed how the lifespan of a human should be 120 years and the average age of an American is only 74. Look at it this way: If people lived up to their potential their lives would be 78% longer (and without disease!) And because 74 is an average, a lot of people are living longer than 74 and a lot of people are living way less than that.

Cancer is the disease that kills more children between the ages of three and thirteen than any other disease, and the primary cause is what they're eating and not eating, and because of toxic buildup in the fatty tissue and organs of their bodies.

If you've read the link US Senate Document 264 you'll understand why this is happening. No one can get nutrition from their food without supplementation because the soils are minerally deficient. Subsequently, there is no such thing as a balanced diet unless you supplement!

Now there are basically three types of supplements and I will address each separately:

Synthetic nutrients
These have no place in the human body. A recent article in JAMA, the "Journal of the American Medical Association" has shown that synthetic vitamins actually increase death. The overall conclusion of the study was that;

Natural Extracted
This type of nutrition in some regards are very much in the same category. Food scientists have isolated some of the major compounds that exist in food and extracted and put them in a pill form to sell them as food supplements. This is tremendously better than synthetic, however, as in synthetic, nutritional imbalances with these isolates can be toxic or at least not as beneficial as possible, especially to a person with a disease who may not be able to absorb these nutrients.

Also too much of any one nutrient can block the absorption of other nutrients. See the The Effect of Trace Mineral Imbalance on Nutrient Absorption article.

Whole Food Supplementation
Whole foods, if they were grown on rich fertile soil with no acid rain or contaminants, would supply you with everything you need for health. So while it may be impossible, or virtually impossible, to get such food at the supermarket, it is entirely possible to get foods from other parts of the world where there is little to no amounts of contamination from pollutants and where the soil is very fertile.

Whole food supplements should be minimally processed to protect as much as possible the delicate balance between all the known and unknown nutrients that exist in them. For example, freeze drying or dehydrating can remove the water from a fruit, (which makes up the majority of all foods) and give you a concentrated form of that food. That's what a whole food supplement is. Usually the body can digest and assimilate this form of nutrition readily.