Vitamins in Food vs. Supplements

Place your bets now :)

Tonight we are going to witness the most anticipated match in the history of nutrition for the heavy weight championship of the world.

Are you ready?! Nutrition fans, are YOU ready?!

For the thousands reading right now, and the millions reading in the near future, let's get ready to rumble.

Tale of the tape

Recently however, there has been a lot of attention regarding the new younger opponent. Tonight the vitamins in food will be challenged to maintain their status on the top of the nutrition world.

In the red corner, the young and powerful multivitamin supplement. It comes into this contest with an undefeated record. Her last two wins were quite impressive and she continues to improve as time goes by. Many feel that she has been the answer to their nutritional needs but only now is finally getting the credit she deserves.

Is tonight going to be a walk in the park for the multivitamin, or will the fruits and veggies muster up one last burst of energy for what would be a marvelous end to an extraordinary career. Let's find out....

Round 1 - Vitamins in Food

The opening round is represented by the vitamins in our food and how it has changed over the years. This has been the food's major weapon, but in the early stages of the opening round it looks as if the fruits and veggies are a bit flat footed.

This lack of action is represented by the nutrient deficient foods that too many of us are eating these days. Only a small percentage of people eat 5 servings of fruits and veggies everyday. The numbers are pretty bad. Hardly anyone is eating the recommended 5 servings per day. Instead the number one vegetable is French fries.

Let's say you're not like the majority of people. Let's assume you get your 5 servings of fruits and veggies everyday. Good for you :)

Unfortunately those punches being thrown are still only soft attempts with no real juice on them. The punches that do have some speed are just wild swings that the multivitamin is seeing from a mile away. The reason they're not effective is because the nutritional value of the fruits and vegetables today don't pack the same nutrients they used to.

Most farmers use chemical fertilizers to grow their crops. Unless you're growing your veggies in the backyard, you won't be getting enough essential vitamins because the nutrients have been depleted from the soil. They're not what they used to be.

The fact is, in today's fast paced world, many of us are not getting enough of our vitamins through our diet because we aren't eating enough vitamin enriched food. It's that simple. Skipping meals, coffee and a muffin, burgers at fast food restaurants are all poor sources of nutrition.

Not only do these foods not contain any vitamins, they contain other harmful ingredients like trans fats and sugars. This is why degenerative diseases are killing more people today than ever before. It's all due to poor nutrition.

And even when we do get those fruits and veggies, their nutritional value in terms of vitamins and other essential nutrients is not what it once was.

The multivitamin wins the opening round.

The fruits and veggies took some tough body shots that could hurt them in the later rounds. It seemed like the vitamins in food were making many mistakes and the multivitamin only had to capitalize on a few of them to win the round.

Round 2, 3 and 4
Convenience, Consistency, and Customization

Convenience:

Convenience of supplements is one of their biggest assets. Take a pill with your meals and you've got your vitamin needs covered.

The first part of convenience involves taking the supplements. It's pretty straightforward. Swallow them down with your meals. When it comes to getting the nutrients into your body, I can't think of anything easier. However, there's another aspect that comes along.

The second part has to do with shopping.

So how do you get those vitamins in your hand? You must have bought them from somewhere. Maybe you got them at your corner store, your pharmacy or perhaps you bought them over the Internet.

If you do it right, you can shop for vitamins once, and never worry about them again.

Here's how it works. You find a good quality product, create a preferred customer account, and receive your vitamins every month. When you shop for vitamins this way, you never have to worry about them again. Every month your vitamins arrive at your doorstep like clockwork. Vitamins in food just can't compete with this advantage.

Create your account, pick what supplements you want, and bingo, you're half way there. I can't help you with the first part, you're just going to have to remember to shallow them yourself :)

Bottom line, you need your vitamins coming to you. It's much more convenient, and convenience makes our lives better!

Consistency:

Consistency is key to everything involving your health, especially when it comes to vitamins. We saw in the first round that vitamins in food took a beating because we just don't get them regularly through this source. You probably don't eat enough vitamin enriched food, and fruits and veggies don't contain as many vitamins as they once did.

When vitamins arrive at your doorstep every month it makes consistency a breeze. All you have to do is take them with your breakfast and dinner.

Daily consumption is a must. Vitamins are not stored in your body for a long time. They get flushed out on a regular basis. To stay healthy they must be replenished everyday.

The multivitamin has the vitamins in food up against the ropes and she's letting her combinations fly one after another.

Customization:

With supplements you can customize your health needs through different products.

Everyone has a unique health profile. Health supplements let you customize your nutritional program to meet your individual needs. We all have individual nutritional needs, and these change as we progress through life.

Depending on your lifestyle, you might be more in need of a specific nutrient. Supplements help you get exactly what you're looking for.

Round 5 - Bad quality supplements

The bell rings for the start of round 5 and the crowd gasped for air, their hands cover their mouths in complete shock and surprise.... The multivitamin slips on the mat and loses her footing, and just like that the fruits and veggies pounce on her with a series of combinations called..... Bad quality supplements.

The market is full of bad supplements. It's a shame because it's your health we're talking about here.

There are many different views and opinions on why there are so many bad supplements out there. Everything from companies just using the power of marketing to tap into people's emotions in order to make sales, to people's theories that the pharmaceutical industry wants to keep people sick in order to keep making a profit from them. I'm not sure if I believe all these theories but there is one area that I would like to discuss.

What we should talk about revolves around quality manufacturing. It's one of the main factors in separating a high quality product from a low quality product.

So why do companies make cheap products?

A lot of it has to do with how they do business. If you look at a company like Wal-Mart for example, what's its motto? Low prices everyday.... Something like that. Well let's not deny it, lots and lots of people shop at stores like Wal-Mart.

This in turn attracts companies that want their products on the shelves at these types of stores. There's one problem. Wal-Mart needs to sell a box of supplements to its customers for a cheap price. For example lets say 10 dollars.

Without getting too deep into the business finance of things, its clear that the supplement company needs to produce that box of supplements for under 10 dollars or else it will lose money. And 9 dollars isn't going to do it. If it sells its vitamins through stores like Wal-Mart, it has royalty fees, shipping and distribution costs, employee costs and so on. Oh, and let's not forget about advertising.

So all these costs, plus the fact that Wal-Mart is putting pressure on this supplement company to lower its product's price because of the "low prices everyday" motto, forces the supplement company to cut its costs somewhere in its organization. Where does that happen? Sometimes at the product and manufacturing level. Create a cheap product with low cost ingredients, sell it through low cost stores, and spend the proceeds on advertisements.

Where does that leave you, the shopper, the customer? It leaves you with a cheap low quality product that your body won't absorb and will not benefit you in anyway.

This is what happens. You're not worried about your 5 servings of veggies and fruits per day because the vitamin commercial says that you're getting everything you need from A to Zinc. Unfortunately that is not the case.

If you're wondering how the vitamin label says it contains x amount of this vitamin, and x amount of this nutrient, well that's the other issue.

Vitamins are still consider a dietary supplement by the Food and drug administration (FDA). What that means is that these products only need to show food standard good manufacturing practices (GMP).

Similar to when you call up your local pizza place and order a pepperoni pizza, do you know how many pepperonis you're going to get? Nope, and under the food standard they don't need to comply with their ingredient labels. Vitamin supplements can claim that they contain certain nutrients when most of the time they will be exaggerating the facts.

At the end of round 5, the multivitamin took a big blow. The crowd is roaring and getting behind the vitamins in food. That slip at the start of the round really cost the multivitamin and she never fully recovered. That was a big win for the food side and who knows what the judges are thinking now.

Round 6 - Pills can't replace a meal

Supplements will never replace a healthy diet filled with fruits and vegetables. A high quality multivitamin out performs the fruits and veggies based on vitamins alone, but no pill can satisfy hunger, or give you energy the way natural food can.

Although a poor diet will increase the risk of you getting chronic diseases related to vitamin deficiencies, your diet will usually never be bad enough where you will be susceptible to vitamin deficiency diseases like scurvy. Those days are over.

That being said, to be free from disease you need optimal levels of health. Your food might save you from scurvy, but without high quality supplements, reaching optimal levels of health is extremely hard. You would have to be constantly eating healthy food all day, and with our lifestyles today that's just unpractical.

Although quality supplements can' t replace a meal, they still provide vitamin levels that surpass the amounts found in an average person's diet.

This round looks like it was a draw, and the match looks pretty close.

Round 7 - Some vitamins are lost in food prep

Another weakness for vitamins in food relates to food preparation. Vitamins are either water or fat soluble. This means certain vitamins dissolve in water. When you cook vegetables in the microwave, some of the nutrients are lost in the process.

Also, cooking vegetables on the stove with high temperatures destroys the nutrients before they ever get into your system.

Another downfall for the fruits and veggies and it looks like the multivitamin is regaining some strength.

Round 8 - There are quality products out there

Sure there are bad quality supplements but it's like that in any industry. There's always going to be bad products, and it's true that there are a lot of low quality vitamins on the shelves, but there are some products that are really worth taking. Let's find out which ones :)

Three things you should look for:

• Potency guarantee
• High quality manufacturing
• Unbiased 3rd party approval

Potency and manufacturing guarantee:

A potency guarantee simply means that what is on the label, is in the bottle. Nutritionals you can trust. There are not many supplement companies that can offer a potency guarantee on every product they sell.

This happens when a company follows internationally accepted Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) set out for the pharmaceutical industry. This means they track every detail of product manufacture from start to finish. We're talking tests for potency, purity, disintegration, weight, hardness, thickness, and stability.

Remember, the Food and Drug Administration has not finalized Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) for dietary supplements. They have stated that dietary supplement GMP should be modeled after foods. Because of this statement, many supplement manufacturers have chosen to follow GMP for foods. This is why we see a lot of low quality supplements on the market.

Low guidelines leads to low costs of production which helps the companies bottom line, but it doesn't take your health into consideration.

Pharmaceutical GMP are federally mandated guidelines for the production of over-the-counter drugs; they are considerably stricter than the food GMP followed by many United States supplement manufacturers.

Pharmaceutical GMP cover virtually every aspect of drug manufacturing, including facility design and maintenance, raw material specification and control, supplier validation, product design and testing, employee training, process control, finished product release, and complaint handling.

When you get sick and are given a prescription for antibiotics or other drugs, you can trust that you're getting the proper medicine. Nutritional supplements that follow the same guidelines as pharmaceutical drugs will certainly give you proper amounts of high quality vitamins, antioxidants and minerals.

3rd party approval:

The final thing to look for is a 3rd party stamp of approval. This is the factor that puts it all together. When a company makes these potency and manufacturing claims and has an independent agency investigating and approving them, they really are giving the customers products they can trust.

An example of a 3rd party stamp of approval would be the NSF. The NSF is an agency that can approve product potency and quality manufacturing.

NSF International is an independent, not-for-profit organization that helps protect public health by writing standards for food, water, air, and consumer goods. It tests and certifies products based on those standards; inspecting for Good Manufacturing Practices, and provides on going monitoring.

If your supplement company meets the standards by the NSF than your potency claims and quality manufacturing assurances are valid. What is stated on the label will be in the product and that is exactly what you need.

And with the final upper cut thrown by the multivitamin, the vitamins in food fall to the mat. The referee counts out the 10 seconds and calls an end to the fight. The multivitamin has her arm raised in victory and is declared the new champion of the highest quality source of vitamins.

Conclusion

The multivitamin is your tool for an optimal healthy lifestyle, but only when combined with a healthy diet. Supplements can't replace natural food, and just because you're supplementing does not mean you should neglect your diet.

Food alone can't give you the levels of nutrition you need to live an optimal healthy lifestyle. There's a difference between getting just enough nutrients and getting optimal levels of nutrients.

Optimal health means going beyond your dietary needs. Of course you don't need this to survive, but with all the other factors like pollution, stress, toxic chemicals and poor nutrition that break our bodies down, quality supplements act as your personal life insurance protecting you from these damaging free radicals. It's the one factor we have control of.

Because of our lifestyles and the environment we live in, we are much better off trying our best to eat healthy everyday, plus including a powerful multivitamin. It's a must for living free from chronic diseases that are killing more people today than anything else.

Please ask questions here and I will recommend a multivitamin just like the one that won the heavy weight championship tonight :)


You can find more information on the truth about nutritional supplements here.





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