Healthy Eating

By Ryan

March 16, 2007 10:00 AM | Link to this

I used to be one of those lazy people who took their vitamin by the pill.

Now I refuse and strongly believe that it is much healthier to get it by eating fruits and vegetables. All the added chemicals and poisons that go into making it a pill cannot be healthy. Plus it just seems scary to take such a concentrated dose of 5000% vitamin A.

I’ll tell you one thing - I feel much healthier and better since I stopped taking vitamin pills and started eating more fruits/vegetables.

By Duke

March 16, 2007 3:45 PM | Link to this

The scandal is that no serious research is being done in this area. Natural substances cannot be patented, so the big drug companies have no motivation. What research is done is deliberately biased against supplements. One commentator said that all this particular study shows is that vitamins must be taken with food to be effective, which any competent student of this subject knows. These studies are deliberately designed to fail on such points. They often use synthetic vitamins, which do not have the same effect. They also compare apples and oranges. Say the risk of some condition is 1%. Suppose people taking supplements show a risk of 2%. They will report that as a 100% increase in relative risk. The identical result from a pharmaceutical substance would be reported as a 1% increase in absolute risk. We simply cannot trust any reports from the medical establishment or the government. Drug companies have fortunes at stake, and they are spending fortunes to influence the process. There are hundreds of studies which show clinical success with specifically targeted nutritional supplements, but they are not placebo-controlled, double-blind studies. Those studies show that the very high dose rates are necessary to achieve the effects. You cannot get those high doses from food. The problem is that vitamins need to be taken within the same matrix that they appear in nature. Some work is being done on this, developing plant-based vitamins, and so forth. The most promising thing I know is a process which dehydrates whole fruit and vegetables into a powder, using very low temperature and pressure so that the nutrients are not destroyed. I am convinced that mainstream medicine is the worst risk to our health. Prescription drugs taken exactly as directed cause over 100,000 deaths per year. Just stop your prescription drugs, and reform your diet and exercise habits, and your health will improve. But we do not have the kind of research we need to evaluate the alternative therapies.

By Emma

March 16, 2007 4:17 PM | Link to this

As a vegan, I eat lots of fruits and vegetables. But I still take vitamins. I don’t take mega-doses, but I figure a little back-up nutrition couldn’t hurt. Besides, vitamin B-12 is hard to get on a vegan diet alone.

By El Bubba

March 16, 2007 5:23 PM | Link to this

People who are ill or have a chronic medical condition are more likely to be taking supplements. They are also more likely to die due to whatever underlying reasons they have for vigilantly taking those supplements. Healthy happy people don’t mind missing a dose. All of the people who answered ‘yes’ and died earlier died from something other than vitamins.

El Bubba