Do We Really Need Supplements?

“I can get everything I need from my diet” is a comment I often hear. If that’s true then why is 1 in 3 Canadians going to develop cancer in their lifetime based on current trends? Why is Type II Diabetes reaching epidemic levels with 1 in 3 children born today likely to develop this highly preventable disease? Why are incidences of Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, Fibromyalgia and a plethora of other degenerative diseases on the rise?

"Almost everything in the produce fruit and vegetable section of the supermarket which we once assumed would be very healthy is anything but," claims Thomas Pawlick, author of The End of Food: How the Food Industry Is Destroying Our Food Supply - And What We Can Do About It, published by Greystone Books in Vancouver. Pawlick, an award-winning science writer, says that much of his research data come from tables published by Agriculture Canada.

"For us to get the same amount of vitamins, minerals and other nutrients that our grandparents or even our parents did," he says, "we would have to eat five times as much or more of some of those fruits and vegetables."

"Every three or four years Agri Canada does a fresh set of tables on the current nutritional value of various foods. They send people out at random to various supermarkets and they buy foods off the shelf, take them back to the lab and do analysis of their nutrient content and these are published," he says, adding that consumers can go online and look at the food tables themselves.

Pawlick says that a fresh tomato bought from the supermarket has 61 per cent less calcium than it did in the 1950s. "Virtually across the board, some losses have been as steep as 70 per cent and it's because of the way the crops are grown and raised."

Pawlick lays the onus directly on the large corporate farms that supply most of the grocery chains in Canada. "They choose varieties of fruits and vegetables, and when they make that choice the question of nutrition or flavour never enters into the picture," he says.

"They select varieties of fruit for thickness so when it's in a truck going across the country it won't get smushed," he charges. "So they want hard rubbery fruit and vegetables for a longer shelf life."

Pawlick says the same corporate farms also select produce for appearance. "They have to have uniformity so that every tomato or strawberry looks like the other one, and they all have to be ripe on the same day so they can be machine-harvested." Pawlick says that because imported produce is harvested prematurely, it is artificially ripened with ethylene gas.

"This decreases the amount of sugar and flavour in the fruit as opposed to allowing it to ripen on the vine." He cites the California strawberry as an example. "They are beautiful, but they are selected and bred to look good - but not to give you any nourishment."

Pawlick says that where consumers can, they should buy local produce. "Usually if it is locally grown it won't be so bad because it isn't being shipped a long distance," he says. "And anything that is locally grown means you are supporting local people and family farmers and the produce is getting to the market faster to retain its nutrients. The less time there is between picking and eating, the more nutrients will still be in the product."

Medical research is finally starting to prove and acknowledge the need for supplements. The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) recently reversed a long-standing anti-vitamin stance by publishing two scientific review articles recommending multivitamin supplements for all adults. Robert H. Fletcher, MD, MSc, and Kathleen M. Fairfield, MD, DrPH, of Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health, reviewed more than 30 years of scientific papers regarding vitamins in relation to chronic diseases and published their findings in two companion articles. The researchers wrote that the North American diet is generally sufficient to prevent overt vitamin deficiency diseases such as pellagra, scurvy, and beriberi. However, they explain, "recent evidence has shown that suboptimal levels of vitamins, even well above those causing deficiency syndromes, are associated with increased risk of chronic diseases including cardiovascular disease, cancer and osteoporosis." In a clinical commentary, they note that “a large proportion of the general population” has less-than-optimal intakes of a number of vitamins, exposing them to increased disease risk, "it appears prudent for all adults to take vitamin supplements."

So what is the best brand of supplements? To find the answer you need to look in the NutriSearch Comparative Guide to Nutritional Supplements by Lyle MacWilliam, MSc. Mr MacWilliams is "a former Canadian Member of Parliament and MLA for British Columbia" who "served at the behest of Canada's federal Minister of Health to help develp a new regulatory frameword for natural health products, ensuring Canadian access to safe, effective, and high quality nutritional supplements." Usana Health Sciences produces supplements that receive the "Five-Star Gold Medal of Achievement". The products are designed to feed the human cell and in conjunction with the Linus Pauling Institute, Usana Health Sciences has created an incredible line of supplements that sets the standard for the rest of the industry to follow. To learn more you can visit my website at http://www.lindaminer.usana.com/.