Should Everyone Take A Multi-Vitamin Each Day?
This is one of the questions I am asked most often. Usually this question is prefaced with, “I watch what I eat, and I think I eat pretty well, …”. Or, “I eat lots of vegetables, …”. Then the question follows, should I still take a multi-vitamin each day?
This is the easiest question I routinely get. The answer is resoundingly, YES, everyone should take a multi-vitamin every day. It doesn’t matter who asks me, it doesn’t matter how old they are, it doesn’t matter how carefully they make their food choices.
I might answer this question differently if we were talking 150 years ago. However, please consider:
Our soils have been largely depleted of minerals and nutrients that are vital to growing nutritious fruits and vegetables. As farmers continue to grow crops year after year, and harvest from the same soils that have been used for decades, the mineral content of those soils is depleted. The lack of minerals in the soil means the crop that is grown will not carry as many vital nutrients as before.
Farmers are not paid to grow nutritious fruits and vegetables. Farmers are paid by the pound, by the bushel or by the ton of product they produce. It is not difficult to understand why the hard-working farmer must concentrate on using fertilizers and chemicals that will maximize their crop yield. However, the fertilizers and chemicals used to make crops grow larger and more abundant are substantially different than what needs to be put in the soil to produce more nutritious crops.
So much of our food today comes to us in a box, a bag, a pouch, or some other package. In order to give this food some level of shelf life there are preservatives and chemicals mixed into the food. These preservatives are amazingly effective at doing just what they are designed to do – preserve food. Unfortunately, these preservatives also make the nutrition content in the food unavailable to our bodies. There might be some nutrition in the food but it passes right through our digestive system and cannot be efficiently absorbed. The term used by nutritionists is bioavailability, and most processed food is definitely not bioavailable.
Our modern food choices and dietary intake, create a more acidic environment in our bodies. Even if our food has good vitamin and mineral content, it is not absorbed efficiently in this more acidic environment. Foods that are deep-fried, microwavable or highly processed are the biggest causes of more acidity in our bodies. This creates more inflammation, more indigestion and less absorption of vitamins and minerals throughout the digestive process.
Our water supply has been filtered, de-ionized and de-oxygenated. Many, many years ago we drank from streams, lakes, wells, and open water systems. This water was not filtered or treated with chemicals like fluoride or bacteria-killing sanitation agents. Back then our water was alive with ionized particles and oxygen. This living water, if you will, greatly assisted a process called chelation. Chelation is when minerals and vitamins attach to other substances and become more bioavailable. If our water comes from any municipal source, it will be lacking in ionized particles and oxygen.
These are just a few of the many reasons I recommend everyone take a multi-vitamin every day. And please, don’t buy the cheapest vitamins available. Many of the cheap brands are not bioavailable and simply pass right through our bodies.
