Great Health In Tough Times

Your Multiple Vitamin-mineral Supplement: Part 4, The Right Stuff

Now that you know a lot about what not to get and why, I am ready to tell you what to get. The best MVM supplement I've found in 50 years is Nutrient 950. It's available from Emerson Ecologics. It has all the right stuff in the correct amounts and ratios except for vitamin K, which people taking blood planners cannot take. To see the formula, click here.

Nutrient 950 has no vitamin A because of vitamin A in high doses interferes with the body's use of vitamin D and may accelerate osteoporosis.There is no need for most people to take vitamin A. if they are getting plenty of mixed carotenoids, which the body will convert into as much vitamin A as it needs but not any excess. There are plenty of carotenoids in Nutrient 950 and in yellow fruits and vegetables.

Nutrient 950 without iron is suitable for adults except for women who have menses and need iron because of the resulting blood loss.It is also suitable for those who have low iron levels for any reason. The original Nutrient 950 formula contains iron and is available from Emerson Ecologics.

Next comes the question, how much to take. The label suggests 4 to 6 capsules per day. I muscle test my patients and find that most of them test for three capsules per day although I have seen it as low as one capsule per day. If you are not doing muscle testing, I suggest 2 capsules twice a day with meals.

This reminds me of the value of muscle testing. It is one of the most valuable skills to have, particularly in tough times, when mistakes in dosing can have more serious than usual consequences and you surely don't want to be wasting money on taking more supplements than you need. T. S. Elliott wrote, "We sit around in a circle and suppose while the Secret sits in the center and knows." The longer I live the more I appreciate going to the center of that circle and knowing what I would otherwise be sitting around supposing about. This is probably not the last time I'll be recommending learning muscle testing but if I have piqued your interest you can learn how to do it from the DVD The Human Electrical System and Flower Essences. You can also learn how to do it from reading Flower Essences, which is less expensive but not as good as being able to see the process demonstrated while hearing it described. Both the book and the DVD are available from Perelandra. Navigate to the catalog, then Books or DVDs.

So that's the story on your multiple vitamin and mineral supplement, the foundation of your nutritional supplement program. I think it may be time to summarize what we've covered so far on nutritional supplements, unless we need to revisit the flu epidemic. There is some pretty heavy stuff coming down now and I am not hearing much about it on the news.

Your Multiple Vitamin-mineral Supplement: Part 3, Quantity

We have considered the reasons that your multiple vitamin and mineral (MVM) supplement is the foundation of your nutritional supplement program, which is a vital part of your process of achieving great health in tough times. We have also considered how you can get a top quality multiple vitamin and mineral supplement. Now we will consider how to get the right formula.

There are hundreds of MVM formulas out there. A few are good; most aren't. Most of the formulas have most of the vitamins and minerals known to be necessary for optimum health. Most of them do not have enough of these essential substances. There are two reasons: ignorance and greed. First, there is ignorance. Many formulas are evidently created by people for who don't know that nutritional supplements are good for anything besides preventing deficiency diseases such as scurvy, pellagra, beriberi, and pernicious anemia. The amounts necessary for preventing deficiency diseases are called the RDA. Most people assume that RDA stands for the Recommended Daily Allowance. Nutritional physicians have known for a long time that it really stands for the Recommended Deficiency Allowance. Those amounts will usually prevent the deficiency diseases but do little or nothing to support optimum functioning and health, particularly when one is under heavy stress during tough times.

Taking an RDA multi, usually in a one-a-day system, is like taking your car to the shop and telling the mechanic that you want the fuel injection system set so that it will deliver only enough fuel to keep the engine from stalling when it idles. Your mechanic can do that and if he does, your engine will run a very long time on a tank of gas but you will not be happy when you put the car in gear and step on the accelerator, because the engine will stall. Taking a one-a-day vitamin is like that. You probably will not get scurvy, pellagra, beriberi, or pernicious anemia but neither will you have any idea how long and well you can function under heavy stress if you have adequate amounts of essential vitamins and minerals. Just as you don't want your engine to stall while you accelerate down the merge lane, you don't want your health to stall when you are dealing with a crisis,especially during tough times.

When talking to people about this, I sometimes say that taking a one-a-day MVM is like a 3 foot leap across a 6 foot ditch -- and sometimes the ditch contains water moccasins.

You may think from the listening to the news this year that greed has disappeared from the American scene. If so, I'm sorry to have to tell you that it is still alive and well in the nutritional supplement industry. We've already talked about how it manifests in the labels that lie. It also manifests on some labels that truthfully list 10 or 20 accessory nutrients, not vitamin or mineral, that have been reported as beneficial to health. All of those accessory nutrients may be present in the product but they are not present in nutritionally significant amounts; that is, in the amounts will that do you much if any good. They are on the label in hopes that they will persuade you to buy that product because it has so many more components than most of its competitors. As William Blake observed, "The truth told with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent."

Now, at last, I am ready to tell you the best formula and product I've found in the past half century and how you can get it.

Your Multiple Vitamin-mineral Supplement: Part 2. Quality

Your multiple vitamin mineral supplement is the foundation of your entire nutritional supplement program. If you don't get it right none of your other supplements will work as well as they could. Because of this the quality of the product is a vital issue. This is because there is no regulation in the nutritional supplement industry so there is no external quality control. (Not that regulation of an industry does much good, as we have recently discovered in the banking industry.) Since there is no external control in the nutritional supplement industry, the first poem I ever learned has served me well for the past half-century in selecting products to prescribe for my patients.

There was never a product made, my friend,
the truth you must confess
that some guy couldn't copy it
and sell his junk for less.

 

In the nutritional supplement industry there is a lot of junk out there on the shelves and on the Web. I've seen reports of two surveys in which over half the products taken at random from health food store shelves did not contain all the substances or the quantities stated on the label. It is essential to me that my patients use high quality, reliable nutritional supplements so I have made it a priority over the years to find them. If my patient’s health does not improve on on the program I recommend, I don't want to have to wonder whether it is because I prescribed the wrong thing or because the product itself was defective.

There are no doubt a lot of excellent nutritional supplements out there about which I know nothing. But I do know what has worked reliably and which companies I know are trustworthy based on decades of experience. The company I recommend most often is Emerson Ecologics. I believe it has a rigorous quality control process that any manufacturer whose products they sell must satisfy. Based on years of experience, if Emerson sells it I trust it for quality.There may be high quality products available in pharmacies and supermarkets but I don't know which they are and don't have time to find out. Neither, probably, do you.

There is another company selling nutritional supplements that I trust because of the quality of their board of consultants and because of the testimonials of people I know who use the products. This company is Life Extension. When I finish this project of posting on this blog the best of everything I learned in 50 years of practicing medicine, I may study the Life Extension formulas and compare prices. If they look better than what I am prescribing, I may recommend them.

In the next post I intend to discuss formulas and doses and make specific recommendations.

Your Multiple Vitamin-mineral Supplement: The Foundation

Just as a physical structure needs a strong foundation to be stable and satisfactory, so your nutritional supplement program needs a strong foundation. Without it both the physical structure and your nutritional supplement program will be unstable and likely to fail under stress just when you need them most.

But why do you need a multiple vitamin and mineral supplement? For decades doctors insisted that there was no need and that if you took a multiple vitamin supplement you are wasting your money and just making expensive urine. That is now changing. There has been recently a recommendation in the Journal of the American Medical Association that everyone take a multiple vitamin and mineral supplement. But why is it necessary? There are two reasons:

1. Our food supply has been degraded to the point that the mineral content of agri-business produced food is insufficient to support health. Research reports indicate that agri-business produced food has about 1/10 to the mineral content of organically grown food. The vitamin content is decreased by shipping  the produce for thousands of miles and by the days or weeks that elapse between the time the food is harvested (usually prematurely) and the time it is eaten. If you want to be playing with a full nutritional deck, eat organically produced food from your local organic farmer and/or grow as much of your own as you can. Organic gardening has powerful health benefits beyond the quality of the food.
2. We live in a perilously polluted environment, which is getting worse all the time. Many industries, most notably coal (Clean Coal: Big Lie) and chemicals, use the planet for a toxic waste dump. This has made the liver the most overworked organ of the 21st century because it has the primary responsibility for detoxifying the poisons we take in every time we eat, drink, and breathe. Our detoxification biochemistry requires a lot of vitamins and minerals. Even if you are a master organic gardener and eat produce fresh picked from your garden every day you would still not get enough vitamins and minerals to adequately support your liver and the rest of your detoxification biochemistry.

For these reasons. It is a essential that you take a high potency, high-quality multiple vitamin and mineral supplement. Otherwise, your body will be so toxic from what you eat, drink, and breathe you that you will not be able to benefit fully from the $800 or so worth of excellent supplements you are already taking.

When you select your multiple vitamin and mineral supplement it is vitally important to consider quality and the quantity of the components in the formula. I will tell you about this in the next blog. I don't know what made me think I could cover all this in one post. It now looks like it will require too more and maybe three. That's okay, though, because this is the foundation of your entire nutritional supplement program and so is fundamentally important.