Natural Foods or Synthetic Pills?

YOUR HEALTH INFO/NOTES

Dr. Peter Pantel, Ph.D. 410-823-6663

Experts that know will tell you to GET YOUR NUTRITIONAL SUPPLEMENTS FROM FOOD, NOT PILLS

The FDA. NCI, ACS, AHA, ADA and other government and health associations all advise that we eat a 5-9 serving of fruit and vegetables each day to help prevent chronic diseases such as lung cancer, colon cancer, breast cancer, prostate cancer, heart disease and strokes, appetite, diabetes, macular degeneration, cataracts, allergies, memory loss and other diseases.

Hippocrates, the father of medicine, said ‘Eat Properly and Leave Drugs on Your Pharmacists' Shelf’. So, no one really says “Pop a Pill”.

Why We Need Supplements – In the Linnaeus classification system, Animals are defined as Mobile, Multicellular Organisms Unable to Synthesize their Own Nutrients. This means that all animals must eat Plants (or other animals that have eaten plants) in order to exist. In our view, nutrients might be described as follows:

• Nutrients- including proteins, carbohydrates and lipids.
• Vitamins – A, Bs, C, D, E, etc. Essential substances used in the synthesizing processes of the body
• Regular Minerals – copper, iron, calcium zinc, magnesium sodium, potassium and others that are found in rather large amount in the body such as blood, bones etc.
• Trace Minerals - Minerals present in minute quantities that help certain processes in the body- chromium selenium, molybdenum, boron and others.
• Phytochemicals – non vitamin, non-nutrient, non-mineral chemicals found only in plants which provide the body with protection against degrading, cell damaging processes.

Over the millions of years, we have evolved to take nutrients (vitamins and other phytochemicals ) from plants and use them to make the chemicals that our bodies need in order to function. Further, we have evolved to:

• receive very large numbers of whole plant nutrients
• utilize a large number of these nutrients, some similar and some very different, to make chemicals that we need in order to function
• utilize many plant nutrients that are balanced and work in a balanced way so as to not overwhelm our own chemistry.

This scenario certainly does not sound like the supplements we get from pills are a good substitute for whole food supplements when instead of thousands, contain one or several products, are synthetic or extracted from rocks, are unbalanced with excesses of some and deficient in other nutrients, and are not identical to the whole food products.

More to follow onspecific phytochemicals and their use.