So what makes it so much better to get your nutrients through foods rather than supplements? I understand you need to eat, but say all you’ve got is potatoes and multivitamins, is that very much less effective than eating a balanced diet? Or is it just “ideal” to get them through foods but you’ll still be ok?
Like if that’s all you had for a month, would your health really suffer negatively?
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Not a direct answer to your question.
It isn’t “important” in a sense. It is wasteful and expensive. A reasonably balanced diet for a healthy average individual will provide all the nutrients and vitamins needed. Unless someone has a health impairment or engaged in some extreme athletics, the need for supplements is mostly driven by marketing.
It is more likely that these overly faddish attachment to supplements are not a healthy mental state. And these things become “modern mythologies” and perpetuate bad habits and even worse advice on general nutrition. There is no reason to encourage this.
If your only exercise equipment is a bicep curl machine, you can develop very large biceps. However, just having large biceps isn’t useful for daily tasks that require multiple muscle groups. You could also hurt yourself if you suddenly shift a load from your strong biceps to other unexercised muscles.
Supplements are similar. You get a lot of one nutrient but our daily function requires multiple. In the worst case, having too much of one nutrient can hurt our bodies. Whole foods often contain those multiple nutrients together.
This has been studied extensively by NASA and the military. Apparently the human body is awesome at **extracting** needed nutrients from whole foods. When you give the body the building blocks such as amino acids, they are given as “salts” and act like osmostic laxatives pulling water and nutrients out of the tissues leading to diarrhea, dehydration and mineral depletion….
Because we don’t actually know the exact conditions the body will thrive. The list of vitamins and the daily requirements are an estimate.
Wouldn’t relying almost solely on suppliments completely destroy your metabolism?
Kinda like just relying on meal replacement shakes, you have to give your digestive system something to actually work on.
Suppliments are only needed if you aren’t able to get certain nutrients through your regular food, OR need more of them than you’d normally get.
* If you swallow a small iron ball, you will poop an iron ball.
* In Hawaii the soil is high in iron, but to grow pineapples they fertilize with iron.
* The air is 78% Nitrogen, yet nitrogen is the most important fertilizer for plants.
The technical terms for this are chelation and bioavailability.
Pure iron or even rusted iron oxide is not easy for life – whether plants or animals to absorb.
Nitrogen in the air is almost impossible for plants to absorb. Only certain plants can absorb it, and that’s because of special bacteria that actually absorb it for the plant.
If we eat meat, our body can quickly absorb iron from it. If we eat plants our body will have difficulty absorbing iron from it. If we eat iron, it doesn’t get absorbed and is pooped out.
Basically these compounds have to be in natural compounds, and this makes it easier for the body to digest and absorb. It also makes it easier for plant roots to absorb.
It’s not really, there just aren’t supplements for everything.
You might know about the big stuff in food: Proteins, fatty acids, carbohydrates, and a handful of vitamins and minerals. These you can easily supplement.
But there are *thousands* of other compounds in food (such as [flavonoids](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5465813/)), and we basically don’t know how they all work or interact with each other.
Supplements only provide specific nutrients that they were formulated for, and most of it is pure snake oil.
Food contains lots of micronutrients that we may not even know about or that your body needs in such minute quantities that isolating them is difficult or impossible.
Potatoes have lots of nutrients… mostly in the skin. If you’re eating lots of potatoes, and ignoring the skin, you’re tossing away what makes it a “whole” food. We often do the same with rice and wheat. White rice is rice with the skin thrown away.
There is no such thing as “superfoods”. That’s just straight up marketing. Eat a diverse and balanced diet, and you don’t need supplements.
The supplements section (often referred to in the business as “pills and powders”) is *the most profitable section in the entire store* (often the ONLY profitable section, and it’s carrying the whole store). They market those products by using dubious and unproven/unprovable health claims and barely skirting the law about how they make those claims. And they’re almost always invoking the nebulous “Big Pharma” and profits (whose products have to go through rigorous testing to prove they actually work) … to sell you something *very* profitable.
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