SISYPHUS PUBLICATIONS ONLINE
Devotees of
Liquid Nutrition Hail The End Of The Horse Pill
It’s
perhaps one of the sadder ironies of our time that the astonishing affluence we
enjoy in inessential luxuries should be accompanied by increasing poverty in the
most basic necessity of all – the very food we eat.
But
the one thing in which our modern Western diet is not
deficient, of course, is calories, as a glance at our surging rates of obesity
and diabetes will quickly confirm.
Worse; these calories are largely provided in the form of refined
carbohydrates, sugar and fat, leaving little time or space for the consumption
of health promoting fresh fruits and vegetables.
Worse
still; there’s overwhelming evidence that even our fruits and vegetables are not
as nutritionally potent as they used to be. As early as 1936 Senate Document 264
(74th US Congress, Second Session ) noted that 99% of Americans were
deficient in necessary minerals and in the light of the continued
intensification of farming methods it seems highly unlikely that the situation
will have improved in the intervening years. Indeed, the 1992
Earth Summit reported that mineral concentrations in
The
figures for other wealthy Western nations are almost as alarming, and the
problem doesn’t just lie in the soil.
The modern prevalence of highly refined grains,
and the treatment of fruits and vegetables with preservatives, dyes, pesticides
and even radiation is a proven disaster for vitamin and mineral retention in our
food, as well as a significant toxic assault with which the human organism
simply wasn’t designed to
cope.
So
not surprisingly in the face of this depressing picture, diet supplements have
become a multi-billion dollar industry in spite of conventional medicine’s
insistence that a well balanced diet including all the main food groups should
supply all our nutritional needs.
In
a way this traditional view has some sense in it, because there’s a fundamental
problem in trying to rectify a very poor diet through supplementation
alone. The problem is that the
human body is a wonderfully complex organism which functions holistically. That’s to say that each and every one of
its almost infinite number of biochemical processes is dependent upon numerous
others for its proper functioning, and no vital nutrient can do its work in the
absence of an adequate supply of the others
So
it’s rarely any use to take specific supplements in isolation except in the very
short term. And since research has shown that healthy animals, including humans,
require at least 45 different minerals as well as essential vitamins, amino
acids and fatty acids, trying to take all these as individual supplements would
be a time consuming and tiresome process.
As
a not very palatable alternative there are of course the torpedo size multis or “horse pills”. The problem is that is that these must
be heavily compressed and treated with a binding agent and the tablets produced
by this process are inevitably bulky and difficult to swallow. Laboratory technicians try to help to
some extent by wrapping the vitamins and minerals in protein to assist with
their metabolism; but according to the 1996 Physician’s Desk
Reference only 10 - 20% is absorbed even if your digestive system is
extremely efficient.
And
for those with even slightly sub-optimal health, this bleak outlook is even
worse, because digestion is one of the most sensitive and easily upset of all
our vital functions. We all know
that when we have any kind of emotional upset or illness, even as minor as a
cold, the first thing to go is our appetite. The fact is that the complex and subtle
biochemistry required for digestion has been thrown off balance, and your body
just doesn’t want to take in food it knows it won’t be able to absorb. So it’s a cruel paradox that it’s just
when you’re most in need of supplements that you’re least likely to be able to
benefits from them.
But
this doesn’t mean you should give up on the idea of supplements. Advocates of liquid vitamin and mineral
supplements now claim absorption rates as high as 95-98% from fresh ingredients
which in the scientific jargon are much more bio-available. That’s to say they’re much more quickly
and easily assimilated into the blood stream and thereby conveyed to the tissues
that so urgently need them.
Since
the plant-derived ingredients are not powdered or compressed and require no
added fillers or binding agents; devotees claim as little as a single fluid
ounce may contain all of the body’s daily nutritional requirements. And as many of the minerals we require
are needed in trace amounts of 100 milligrams or less, there may be some truth
in this
No
one suggests, that a liquid supplement can take the
place of a healthy diet, but it may perhaps be worth considering as a convenient
and extremely cost effective form of health insurance.
Steve Smith
June
2007
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