Why are vitamin pills not a replacement for a balanced diet?
In: Biology
Nutrition scientists–I guess that is the word for them–say that we really don’t know everything that is nutritionally required by our bodies. Our guts are inhabited by trillions of bacteria, and we more or less exist because we feed them, and they create nutrients for us. No liquid diet or manufactured pill can substitute for the thousands of foods we can send to those critters. Think of all the varieties of fruits, veggies, grains, and animal proteins we humans eat. Scientists haven’t been able to break all these foods down into every possible nutritional substance in these foods, to figure out exactly what nourishes our bodies. Plus, culturally, humans eat different foods all over the earth. We seem to do well on such a wide range of foods, that about all we know for sure is that we need a good mix of them. Some mixes work better for some individuals than others. Vitamins minimally cover the bases–we hope. But there’s probably a thousand more nutrients we don’t know about yet.
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