Do taking vitamins and mineral pills really help?!


Question:

Do taking vitamins and mineral pills really help?

Right now i'm almost perfectly healthy, but would taking vitamins help me or hurt me? Also my grandma is from Mexico and she's in her sixties with a few common health problems a lot of old people have. She always takes these crazy medicines and concoctions to help her arthritis and back problems, but is this really helping her. i once took dry crushed up snake powder to help my acne. I've visited soothsayers and I've taken oregano in boiled coca cola to sooth and heal my sour throat and bronchitis when I was younger.


Answers:

The short answer is yes - they can help, but, as others have suggested, it is important to know where they come from and what they contain.

Many vitamin and mineral products use synthetic ingredients and a significant proportion either include forms which are not readily useable by the body (such as calcium carbonate, which is only about 5% bioavailable) or which do not contain other essential ingredients which are required for proper absorption (e.g. vitamin D with calcium). This means that they can have little or no beneficial effect.

However, not all vitamins and minerals are the same. There are many manufacturers that are responsible and who make considerable efforts to produce highly beneficial products with well-balanced ingredients.

That said, and as suggested above, by far the best way to get nutrients into your system is to eat natural, nutritious food. the problem with this is that it isn't that easy to get (unless you grow it yourself). The vast majority of food consumed in the Western world is lacking in any meaningful nutritional content and/or is filled full of toxic chemicals, either as by-products of the commercial production system or as "additives".

The reason for this is that modern production methods mean that most farmers grow the same crop repeatedly on the same land without revitalizing the land in-between crops. The result of this is that most crops are grown on land that has virtually no meaningful mineral content (as reported to congress in the 1920s, since which it has gotten far worse), so the resultant plans have little chance of having any minerals in them.

The best option of most people is to follow the four cardinal rules of buying food.

Buy Local
Buy seasonal
Buy fresh
Buy organic

and take heed of what should be #5 - avoid ANYTHING that comes in a box, wrapper, can etc (including those "pillow" bags of mixed salad, which are washed in chlorine and packed in nitrogen to make them "last" for up to 2 weeks!).

The rise of the supermarket has gotten most people used to cheap prices (at the cost of the producers) and the illusion of permanent global summertime - it is not natural to eat strawberries in the winter! In the meantime, health gets worse, doctors get richer and everyone needs to supplement just to get the basic vitamins and minerals needed for survival.

Organic may be more expensive, but it is far better for you (at least when it is TRULY organic).

Brian
http://www.natural-health-information-ce...




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