Nutrition: The Use of Nutritional Supplements

[Explor­ing Life] Many peo­ple take a nutri­tional sup­ple­ment (also known as dietary or food sup­ple­ments) assum­ing that the sup­ple­ment will in some man­ner assist in main­tain­ing or improv­ing their health. Nutri­tional sup­ple­ments are widely avail­able to con­sumers since they are often clas­si­fied as a form of food rather than a drug. A sup­ple­ment may include a com­bi­na­tion of: vit­a­mins, min­er­als, herbs, botan­i­cals, amino acids, and enzymes. It is referred to as a sup­ple­ment since it is intended to be added on to an exist­ing diet. There are a num­ber of issues sur­round­ing the use of dietary sup­ple­ments, but per­haps the most impor­tant is whether they are required to main­tain good health or not.

Nutri­tional Sup­ple­ments: Basic Assumptions

1. Nutri­tion­ism: Nutri­tion­ism is a ide­ol­ogy that pre­sumes sci­ence can iso­late, iden­tify and clas­sify, and eval­u­ate the value of indi­vid­ual nutri­ents. These deci­sions are then used as a basis for deter­min­ing the ideal amounts of vit­a­mins, min­er­als, and other nutri­tional com­po­nents, that should be in our daily diet or used to help improve a spe­cific condition.
   • If the assump­tion is true, then nutri­tional sci­ence can iso­late, iden­tify, clas­sify, and eval­u­ate pro­vide ideal amounts of nutri­ent com­bi­na­tions required through­out our lifetime.
   • If the assump­tion is false, then nutri­tional sci­ence may be exper­i­ment­ing with the health of consumers.
2. Syn­thetic vs. Organic Nutri­ents: A nutri­tional sup­ple­ment is syn­thet­i­cally pro­duced; nutri­ents in whole, organic food exist in their nat­ural con­text. In sim­ple terms, the nutri­tional com­po­si­tion of a sup­ple­ment is vastly dif­fer­ent than the nutri­tional com­po­si­tion of real organic food. If our diet is nutri­tion­ally defi­cient then nutri­tion­ism pre­sumes that the diet can be sup­ple­mented with syn­thetic nutrients.
   • If the assump­tion is true, we assume that the human body metab­o­lizes real food in the same man­ner as a syn­thet­i­cally pro­duced pill or pow­der, and that a syn­thet­i­cally pro­duced sup­ple­ment can make up for nutri­tion­ally defi­cient food sources and dietary habits.
   • If the assump­tion is false, then nutri­tional sup­ple­ments are hav­ing a range of effects that we do not fully under­stand, and it is rea­son­able to assume that the pos­si­bil­ity of long-term adverse effects may exist.
3. Food Can­not Pro­vide Ade­quate Nutri­tion: What we often call food is not really food, it is a food-like sub­stance. Here I refer to food in its pure state, that is, whole, raw, organic veg­eta­bles, fruits, nuts, seeds, as well as free, wild, nat­ural meat sources. If our def­i­n­i­tion of food includes food-like sub­stances (i.e. food con­tain­ing any addi­tives, chem­i­cal residues, non-organic, or GMOs) then it is not a food in the purest sense of the word. A food-like sub­stance has two basic char­ac­ter­is­tics: a) a toxic com­po­nent; and b) nutri­tional defi­cien­cies due to human inter­ven­tion in the source. Nutri­tional sup­ple­ments are some­times viewed as a kind of insur­ance pol­icy against a nutri­tion­ally defi­cient diet, that is, there is a pre­sump­tion that the nutri­tion we fail to get through our diet can be sup­plied by nutri­tional supplements.
   • If the assump­tion is true, then food-like sub­stances are accept­able and dietary defi­cien­cies can be alle­vi­ated through nutri­tional supplementation.
   • If the assump­tion is false, then nutri­tional sup­ple­ments do not off­set a weak def­i­n­i­tion of food and inad­e­quate diet.

What Should We Assume?

The true or false sce­nar­ios are, of course, extreme oppo­sites. The grey area between them can be filled with numer­ous what if sce­nar­ios. How­ever, there are two com­mon fac­tors com­mon to all the assump­tions that are worth noting.

If you include fruits, veg­eta­bles and whole grains in your daily diet, and vary the food plants and ani­mals you eat, you really don’t need to worry about nutri­ents… There isn’t much evi­dence that tak­ing a daily sup­ple­ment makes healthy peo­ple health­ier, but if it makes you feel bet­ter, go for it. [1]

First, there is an under­ly­ing belief that pure food in its organic state does not sup­ply all of the vital nutri­ents we need to be healthy. My belief is that food, in its purest state, does pro­vide every­thing we need for health — and more. The prob­lem is not with food itself, but what we have done to it through human inter­ven­tion. The com­mon def­i­n­i­tion of food has become far too mal­leable, and typ­i­cally includes prod­ucts that are not really food (i.e. — any­thing in a can or box, for exam­ple, are not food). How we think about food is in fact become con­fused and mis­di­rected. Due to human inter­ven­tion and the use of addi­tives, chem­i­cal fer­til­iz­ers and pes­ti­cides, genet­i­cally mod­i­fied organ­isms, and the degra­da­tion of our nat­ural envi­ron­ment, our sources of food have become impaired and frail. The nutri­tional value in food has declined. Until we define food in a rig­or­ous man­ner, improve the qual­ity of our food sources, rede­fine our diets using pure food as the guid­ing prin­ci­ple, we will con­tinue to suf­fer the effects of nutri­tion­ally frail and toxic food-like substances.

And you’re much bet­ter off eat­ing whole fresh foods than processed food prod­ucts. That’s what I mean by the rec­om­men­da­tion to eat ”food.” Once, food was all you could eat, but today there are lots of other edi­ble food­like sub­stances in the super­mar­ket. These novel prod­ucts of food sci­ence often come in pack­ages fes­tooned with health claims, which brings me to a related rule of thumb: if you’re con­cerned about your health, you should prob­a­bly avoid food prod­ucts that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food prod­uct is a good indi­ca­tion that it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat. [2]

Sec­ond, there is an under­ly­ing belief that nutri­tional sci­ence is a mature and val­i­dated prac­tice. It is not. [3] Even to some­one who is non-scientific, the notion of iso­lat­ing a spe­cific nutri­ent within a vast, com­plex, and highly inter­con­nected food source, deter­min­ing its indi­vid­ual essen­tial value with­out error, and then devel­op­ing syn­thetic iso­late in order to pro­vide a fan­tas­ti­cal rec­om­mended daily allowance, seems some­thing less than prob­a­ble. This is not to say the nutri­tional sci­ence lacks value or that we should ignore it, but it is to say that it is a nar­row, incom­plete, iso­lated prac­tice that fails to address the inter­con­nected, inter­ac­tive, and com­plex prop­er­ties of nutri­ents in their nat­ural con­text. In this sense, I view cur­rent state of nutri­tional sci­ence as being emer­gent, that is, in a very early stage of devel­op­ment and there­fore its rec­om­men­da­tions should not be taken literally.

Non­spe­cific symp­toms, such as nau­sea, vom­it­ing, diar­rhea, and rash, are com­mon with any acute or chronic vit­a­min over­dose. Vitamin-caused symp­toms may be sec­ondary to those asso­ci­ated with addi­tives (eg, man­ni­tol), col­or­ings, or binders; these symp­toms usu­ally are not severe. [4]

Pure Food and Nutri­tional Supplements

The first and most impor­tant source of nutri­tion is food. All of our nutri­tional require­ments can eas­ily be met through a diet of pure food , and absti­nence from all food-like sub­stances. Pure food that is locally pro­duced is nutri­tion­ally supe­rior when com­pared to non-local organic food that has been shipped over a large dis­tance (i.e. — greater than 200 kilometers).

How­ever, even the most ded­i­cated to eat­ing pure food will find it to be a chal­leng­ing task. Our social-economic sys­tems are sim­ply not designed to pro­vide pure locally-produced food to the gen­eral pop­u­la­tion. This cre­ates a grey area in our assumptions.

• If the pure food we require for opti­mal health is not avail­able and there­fore can­not sup­port my over­all diet, then are nutri­tional sup­ple­ments required to make up for this unavoid­able deficit in my diet?
• If sup­ple­ments are required, what kind of sup­ple­ments and in what dosages should I be tak­ing them?
• What are the long-term effects and inter­ac­tions that may occur from tak­ing sup­ple­ments over an extended period of time?

“This idea that sup­ple­ments are safe to use is unproven — they haven‘t been around for long enough. Peo­ple tak­ing high dose sup­ple­ments are the guinea pigs of the future. There’s no way you can record adverse effects for high lev­els of sup­ple­ments, and absence of reported effects does not mean there’s an absence of effects.” [5]

Ulti­mately, cor­rect­ing our food sources is the only solu­tion to obtain­ing ideal nutri­tion. In this sce­nario, syn­thet­i­cally pro­duced nutri­tional sup­ple­ments would be unnec­es­sary. Organic nutri­tional sup­ple­men­ta­tion from pure food sources, some­times called super­foods, is another crit­i­cal direc­tion to pur­sue. I sense that this cor­rec­tion will be a locally-generated ini­tia­tive, not one that will come to us via large food cor­po­ra­tions. Embrac­ing the ideal of pure food as a shared local respon­si­bil­ity is, to my think­ing, the real future of food. Food is nutrition.

Notes

1. Mar­ion Nes­tle in Which is bet­ter — food or nutri­ents?, San Fran­cisco Chron­i­cle, Sep­tem­ber 10, 2008 (Accessed July 2009). Also see Mar­ion Nestle’s Food Pol­i­tics Blog.

2. Michael Pollen in Unhappy Meals Jan­u­ary 28, 2007 (Accessed July 2009).

3. An excel­lent overview of the lack of sci­en­tific knowl­edge asso­ci­ated with nutri­tional sup­ple­men­ta­tion is Vit­a­min Poi­son­ing: Are We Destroy­ing Our Health with Hi-Potency Syn­thetic Vit­a­mins?” Organic Con­sumers Asso­ci­a­tion, July 21, 2009 (Accessed July 2009).

4. Tox­i­c­ity, Vit­a­min in eMed­i­cine, April 20, 2009 (Accessed July 22, 2009).

5. Vit­a­min Sup­ple­ments — Good, The Bad And The Ugly in Bio-Medicine (Accessed July 2009).