Dietary supplements work for everyone. Nutritional science has proven that by supplementing our diets with nutrient concentrates we can experience health benefits beyond what we get from our foods. By taking supplements people experience less illness, less time lost from work, higher wellbeing, lowered risk of disease. Most people now take supplements every day. But how do they find supplements they can trust? The Big Step: Commit to Being Healthy The first step is to make a commitment to your health. Take personal responsibility for your health. Become as good at managing your health as you are at managing your job or career. Understand that you have to be the one guiding your body to good health. If you don’t take the initiative, it’s unlikely anyone else will. The next step is to learn (or re-learn) the basics of how the body works. The brain, heart, liver, digestive system, reproductive system, immune system, bone and joints, other organ systems—what they do in the healthy body, how they are helped or hurt by lifestyle, stress, exercise, dietary habits, aging. What are the things within your power to support your organ system functions and your health as a whole? Watch educational TV, read educational books, visit educational websites, attend health fairs, take courses at your local educational institution. As you become educated about your body you’ll become more convinced of the health advantages of taking dietary supplements. You’ll learn to penetrate the smoke and mirrors around pharmaceutical drugs as you read the small print of the package inserts. You’ll also learn that just about anything a drug can do, a combination of nutrients can do as well or better. Then you’ll want to take supplements in a serious way—beyond the one-a-day habit. Previously in totalhealth we’ve explained how vitamins and other nutrients support the thousands of metabolic processes that keep us alive, how they protect us from damage by toxins, viruses, even emotional stress. How they give us more energy and drive, so we don’t have to need artificial mental and sexual stimulants. Each of us, whatever our present state of health, should develop a dietary supplementation program that caters to our individual desires and our individual health flaws, whether inherited or (more often) caused by poor lifestyle or the simple “wear and tear” of life. To be really effective, your personal program will be related to your being educated about the nutrients in dietary supplements and how they work. Don’t worry, this is not rocket science and it can be learned without blowing a mental fuse. To become educated about dietary supplements you will need reliable sources of information. Here the Internet is a mixed blessing. It carries a huge amount of information on supplements, most of which is inaccurate. A great deal of the Internet information is, well, just plain hype. Often real experts are “virtually kidnapped” to make online “endorsement” of products they’ve never heard of. So what are better sources than the Internet for information on supplements? Most authoritative are the peer-reviewed scientific papers published by research groups. However these are complicated and difficult for the nonspecialist to decipher; plus the authors are often pressured to hold back on making recommendations in favor of supplements (“further studies are required…”). Then there are overview articles, prepared by qualified technical people both from within the dietary supplement industry and from outside. Those from the inside can be biased in favor of supplements, those from the outside often attack supplements. Here’s where a personal health adviser becomes useful. Find an Integrative Practitioner as Health Adviser Everyone should have a personal health adviser. Just as many people have financial advisers of one kind or another, or one shop they trust to work on their car, they need to have trained people they can trust for advice about their health. Within the communities are growing numbers of integrative practitioners (let’s call them IPs). Most IPs are compassionate professionals, with backgrounds as diverse as chiropractic, nutritional counseling, acupuncture and herbal medicine, naturopaths, osteopaths, and MDs who prescribe both nutrients and drugs. Most IPs try to do the best for their patients by combining the best of the emergent, unorthodox practices with the best of the orthodox mainstream. For patients in remote areas and unable to come into the office, many IPs will do telephone consultations. For people with diagnosed health problems I recommend putting together a health support team, with one or two trusted relatives or friends and an IP as an equal member along with the mainstream/HMO doctor and whatever specialists have to be involved. For healthy people, a smaller team of caring personal contacts and an IP would also be a good idea. Integrative practitioners may have to be paid out of your pocket. Many are not covered by the mainstream insurance plans because they don’t do “shortcut” medicine. But if you’ve come away from your latest 10-minute slot at your HMO feeling disrespected, buying an IP’s time might be a good investment in your health. It just might save your life. Think about a Medical Savings Account, a legal way to deduct your IP costs from your taxes. Get the best IP you can afford to be your personal health adviser. As you become actively engaged with your IP/health adviser, fully disclosing your health history, cooperatively you’ll both develop your personal dietary supplement program. Then you can start shopping around. Always beware of products that have aggressive health claims attached to them. Us your commonsense and work closely with your adviser. Have your adviser help you develop a list of minimum requirements for the recommended products in terms of nutrient ingredients, potency levels, quality concerns, and other types of useful questions to ask. Often your health adviser will recommend a good local health food store. The Health Food Store, Community Health Service The health food store is the community health service center. When you go in, ask for the store’s nutritionist and direct your questions to them. Whatever questions they can’t answer right away, they can promise to make further inquiries about and contact you later. The nutritionist can help you choose between the many reputable product brands and variations to pick the products most appropriate for your particular needs. These aren’t always going to be the most expensive. Some will be expensive; some will be surprisingly affordable. Some of the best supplements are the most affordable: the vitamins and essential minerals, for example. These are the nutrients our body does not make and must import from the outside. One such—alpha lipoic acid—is fairly costly but wonderful for making energy, with high antioxidant value, and useful to help prevent diabetes. A multivitamin-mineral is the cornerstone of anyone’s personal supplementation program; for logistical reasons the effective intake is minimally three capsules a day. For tabletted products ask to see a dissolution test, to make sure it will break down in your tummy as it should. Other nutrients crucial to a basic personal program are vitamin C at 2-6 grams a day (yes, 2,000-6,000 milligrams) and the “fish oil” fatty acids EPA and DHA at 600-1,000 milligrams. These long-chain omega-3 fatty acids are currently the biggest news in nutritional medicine. Inflammation has emerged through mainstream clinical research as the main driving force in most disease, and the omega-3s are the most effective and safest means to combat inflammation long-term. EPA+DHA are the clinically documented omega-3 forms, superior over alpha-linolenic acid (ALA). Taking them as supplements protects against heart attacks and strokes, helps relieve arthritis and other inflammatory conditions, may lower Alzheimer’s risk, and even may help prevent cancer. When shopping for these, insist on seeing a statement from the manufacturer that the product is free of mercury and pollutant residues. For many people, certain other nutrients are conditionally essential—the body is supposed to make them but doesn’t, at least not in sufficient amounts. Of the best-researched nutrients in this category, EPA+DHA, PS (phosphatidylserine), PC (phosphatidylcholine), glucosamine, carnitine, and taurine are fairly affordable, while GPC (glycerophosphocholine), CoQ (Coenzyme Q10) and SAMe (S-adenosylmethionine) can be costly. All these are thoroughly proven nutraceuticals: the more of them you can afford to take, the better for your health. Be careful of the “cut-rate” supplements you see in the supermarkets, drugstores, and mass-market outlets. With supplements you get what you pay for, and many of these cheap products have cheap ingredients and questionable filler ingredients. Herbals are not as directly involved in our biochemistry as the essential and conditionally essential nutrients, but many are clinically proven safe and effective. For example, lycopene is valuable for prostate health. However, many herbal ingredients are chemically different from the standardized extracts on which the actual clinical research has been done, and there is no requirement that this be disclosed on the product label. This is where your health adviser or health food store nutritionist can be a great help. Organic Foods are Essential to Your Program Taking supplements never substitutes for having nutritious foods in the diet. But our food supply has been progressively getting worse, and this increases the importance of obtaining additional nutrients through supplements. The mainstream beef and chicken industries don’t exactly inspire our confidence. The mainstream crops are being heavily treated with toxic chemicals. Besides the toxicity of the “active” ingredients, the so-called “inactive” ingredients of herbicides and pesticides usually do not have to be disclosed on the label but can be highly toxic to humans. These types of toxins have infiltrated our food supply, forcing us to grow our own foods and/or buy organic. This makes your health food store a big player in your daily life. There you can get organic vegetables, grains and fruit, minimally-processed “fast foods,” even free-range organic meats. Sure, they’re more expensive, but not as expensive as becoming diseased or losing time from work due to eating contaminated or otherwise inferior foods. Concerning the tens of thousands of toxins in our air, water, soils, and foods there are no “thresholds” for safe exposure. Nutrients fight the toxins in our tissues, and organically grown whole foods have superior nutrient content over their non-organic counterparts. Eating superior foods while taking potent dietary supplements improves our power to combat the many challenges of modern living. Many clinicians and scientists, even some previously biased against nutrition, now believe that eventually aging will be slowed using supplements as part of an integrative personal strategy. We urge everyone—young or old, healthy or sick—to recruit a health adviser and develop a supplementation program. By sticking to a good clean diet, taking the supplements daily, exercising regularly, lowering our daily stress levels, and seeing to our spiritual development, we all improve our chances for a long and happy life. |
