New England Health Advisory

By Andrew Palmer

Do you need a multivitamin if you eat well?

Conventional thinking used to be that most adults could get good nutrition from their diets and that vitamin supplements were not necessary. However, in the last few years, a growing number of studies have shown most diets fall well below the minimum recommended dietary allowance for many nutrients.

In other words, eating healthy food alone is not enough.

An article in the Journal of the American Medical Association concluded that, “All adults should take vitamin supplements to help prevent chronic disease. The daily use of a multivitamin can be a potentially powerful way to improve one’s health.”

At New England Health Advisory, we suggest eating a whole food and plant-based diet. Avoid foods with empty calories and take a multivitamin as insurance against nutritional gaps in your diet.

I try to eat a serving of fresh fruit at lunch each day. I also sneak another serving in after dinner as dessert. I use fruits as snacks at work. I bring grapes, apples, bananas, berries or cut-up melons when they are in season. But there are days when I just have an extra cup of coffee at snack time. The fruit just sits on my desk.

So it’s hardly surprising that nine out of 10 Americans fail to eat the recommended amount of fruits and vegetables … 96% don’t get the recommended dietary allowance of the essential vitamins. These people would benefit from supplements.

But did you know that most multivitamins on the market today, maybe even the one you take, don’t make up for the shortfall of vitamins and minerals in your diet? They advertise that they do, but they don’t.

Because of this, our contributor Dr. Sears formulated his own proprietary anti-aging multivitamin. Just three tablets a day give you the exact daily dosage of the 39 important vitamins, minerals and bioactive compounds he recommends for optimal health.

Primal Force Daily Power delivers each one of the 39 nutrients and minerals hand-picked by Dr. Sears—at levels that make a real difference to your health.

Here are just a few examples:

*Alpha Lipoic Acid to combat free radicals: With the ability to fight free radicals in both the fatty and water areas of cells, it can help lower your risk of atherosclerosis, lung and neurological problems. This new anti-aging vitamin gives you the 50mg you need daily.

*Vitamin B1 for improved circulation: Also known as thiamine, vitamin B1 aids in both blood formation and brain function. This new anti-aging multivitamin gives you 40 mg of vitamin B1 daily—nearly 27 times more than you get by taking a leading supermarket vitamin brand.

*Boron to ease joint pain: An important trace mineral, boron can reduce joint pain and inflammation by slowing the production of inflammatory enzymes. But because farming and ranching practices have depleted boron from the soil, you don’t get enough of it in your diet. Daily Power gives you 2mg of boron daily.

Click to try Primal Force Daily Power today.

Yours for health and wellness,

Andrew Palmer
Publisher
New England Health Advisory

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By Inger Pols

This is part two of a five-part series on the five supplements I think every adult should take. On Monday, I sent you the first of my five-part series, which focused on whole-food based multivitamins. You can read that article here.

Ubiquitous means to exist or to be everywhere; to be omnipresent. From the same word source comes the second supplement I think virtually everyone should be taking: ubiquinol.

Ubiquinol is the active and reduced form of CoQ10 (also known as ubiquinone). CoQ10 is found in every cell of the body and performs a critical role in cellular energy production. It also protects against free radical damage, which affects the aging process on numerous levels. While both ubiquinone and ubiquinol are necessary for sustaining life, ubiquinol is the source of the powerful antioxidant benefits that we often associate with CoQ10. More than 90% of the CoQ10 found in a healthy person’s blood is in the form of ubiquinol.

You’ve probably heard about free radicals, even if you don’t know how they affect you.  Free radicals are oxygen atoms deficient in electrons that become reactive in our bodies. They then wander “freely” through our bodies and cause damage to our tissues and DNA. Most experts agree that if we could reduce the free radical damage, we could slow down the damage that occurs in our bodies as we age. Ubiquinol can help because it limits free radical production.

CoQ10 also helps in the production of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the energy base for all our cells. But your ability to produce CoQ10 and then convert it to ubiquinol, even if you eat whole unprocessed foods, diminishes as you age. If you are under 25 years old, you will do well taking CoQ10 as a supplement. But after age 25, the conversion process becomes more challenging and research shows that taking the reduced form, ubiquinol, has a greater effect on helping to produce more cellular energy. Taking ubiquinol can also help you absorb more CoQ10 from your food.

In addition to free radical protection and increased cellular energy, ubiquinol can improve heart health. (I addressed its role in combating the oxidation that can occur with small dense LDL in this cholesterol article.) Ubiquinol has also been shown to help manage high blood pressure and to benefit seriously ill patients suffering from advanced late-stage congestive heart failure.

In one study, critically ill patients with life expectancies of less than six months were given ubiquinol for three months. They experienced a 24%-50% increase in their heart’s ability to pump blood, in some cases tripling their plasma CoQ10 levels. They all demonstrated significantly improved heart function and lived past initial expectations.

Statins lower cholesterol on the same pathway that your body uses to produce CoQ10. Research shows that CoQ10 production is significantly reduced by statins so ubiquinol supplementation is a must for anyone taking those drugs.

While ubiquinol is clearly tied to good heart health, its ability to mitigate free radical damage and support base cellular energy functions is not fully understood. Ubiquinol has only been available in supplement form since 2006, but what we have learned in that limited time is impressive.

Ubiquinol is important to many key processes in the body because it supports basic cellular level functions, so the benefits are likely far beyond what can be cited through the limited research available now. Whether heart health or anti-aging is a concern, the research that does exist now is compelling enough to recommend this supplement. And I believe we’ll learn even more about how important this vitamin-like substance is to many health functions in the coming years.

To your health!

Inger Pols
Editor of New England Health Advisory

By Inger Pols

Today we’re starting a five-part series: The five supplements I think every adult should take. The first one is a whole-food based multivitamin.

A recent article in Reader’s Digest called vitamins a scam and said that taking them is a waste of money. It cited a study of 160,000 mid-life women that showed no difference in health with respect to the big diseases like cancer, heart disease and stroke, from taking a multivitamin. But as with all studies, you need to dig deeper—in this case because not all vitamins are created equal. (I am always suspect when a magazine whose advertising is largely from pharmaceutical companies says vitamins are worthless.)

The article challenges the benefits of certain individual supplements, such as vitamins A or E, which will likely have little, if any, effect when taken in isolation without proper co-factors. The article does recommend one standalone vitamin that should be taken by everyone: vitamin D. We’ve already discussed the importance of vitamin D and the rampant deficiency among children and adults today, so I couldn’t agree more. (Click here for more on vitamin D.) Vitamin D3 can stand on its own and I take it daily; most other vitamins need to be taken together as part of a complete nutritional package.

Eating a whole food and plant-based diet will go a long way toward staying healthy and I strongly recommend we do both. We cannot eat too many dark leafy green vegetables and we should be eating the rainbow (fruits and vegetables that cover every spectrum of color from white to orange, red, green and purple.) But I also take a whole food multivitamin and a whole food raw green superfood powder, because the truth is, it is very difficult to get the nutrients we need from our modern food supply.

These days, to offset the bad fats and processed food sugars we consume and to restore balance within our bodies, we need more vegetables than ever. We are not just eating to fuel our bodies, we are eating to heal our bodies from the inflammation and oxidation of our processed diets. It’s getting harder to get the nutrients we need because in addition to the packaged and prepared foods in our diets, our fresh food supply is not as vitamin rich as it used to be. Soil has been depleted of nutrients, food is sprayed with chemicals and pesticides or is genetically modified to grow bigger or to resist disease, and then it is transported hundreds or thousands of miles to get to our tables.

If you go to a farm or a market and buy fresh produce, you know that after a few days on your counter, it will begin to go bad. Now think about the grapes or tomatoes you are buying from the opposite coast or from South America. They were picked, packaged and then shipped (sometimes by barge) to the U.S., sent out by truck across the country to your local market, displayed on the shelf for several days and then finally taken home.

For the produce to survive that trip looking fresh and beautiful and without bruising, it is heavily sprayed with chemicals, and picked before it is ripe and allowed to mature along the way. Once the fruit leaves the vine, it doesn’t get the sun and the nutrients any longer, it doesn’t fully develop the enzymes and phytonutrients that are usually present in mature fresh picked local produce.

(I’m going to talk about organic versus local and making better food choices soon, but you should also know that many chemicals and pesticides banned in the U.S. are used freely in the foreign countries from which we buy produce.)

Studies estimate more than 50% of nutrient value is lost in the journey from farm to table. So even if you are doing your best to eat a lot of good fruits and veggies, unless you have access to a local farm, it is hard to get food with the nutritional profile you need for health. Then you’d have to eat a lot of it, and how many of us can sit down and eat a bunch of tomatoes or a basket full of kale. You’ll feel full long before you can finish, especially if you paired it with a big piece of meat protein or dairy.

While I fantasize about growing my own food, here in New England, with a long, cold winter and a busy life with two kids and work, it’s not possible at the moment. I do my best to shop at local farmers’ markets for fresh produce, and I buy flash frozen organic produce when I can’t. But despite my best efforts, I do not believe that I can get the nutrition I need without taking a multivitamin (my kids take one too).

But there is a big difference among multivitamins. There are natural organic whole food based products that when manufactured correctly leave the integrity of the whole food intact.

When looking for a good whole food supplement, keep in mind that whole foods are just that: whole foods. Look for ingredients such as carrots, spinach, wheat grass, spirulina, kale, celery etc. There will be vitamins listed as well but their sources will also be present: The original foods from which they were derived. When the ingredient list reads more like a science report than a grocery list, and there are no food sources included just isolated chemicals, it’s typically comprised of manmade synthetic compounds.

Because synthetic vitamins are created in a lab to simulate the real thing, they are often not identical in the way they interact with or are absorbed by the body. They are often missing minerals, nutrients and other requisite co-factors for assimilation. In addition, they often contain cheap fillers and binders from ingredients like sand and titanium dioxide, dibasic calcium phosphate and microcrystalline cellulose, they are ingredients that our bodies cannot absorb and that may even be harmful to us. Many common over-the-counter vitamins are passed through the stool whole and intact. (Centrum is famous for this).

Taking a multivitamin that includes a broad spectrum of vitamins, minerals and nutrients can make a difference, but only if it is bioavailable and bioabsorpable; in other words your body can actually break down and absorb the nutrients. That is not possible with synthetic vitamins. I prefer a whole food-based product that is as close to what I should be eating as possible, and made from the real thing, not created to imitate it.

Interestingly the Readers Digest article’s main argument against taking multivitamins said, “These days, you’re extremely unlikely to be deficient if you eat an average America diet, if only because many packaged foods are vitamin enriched.”

Think about that for a moment.

Food manufacturers strip out all the vitamins that exist in the food during the manufacturing process. Then they “enrich” them, by adding back cheap lab-created imitations. They want us to believe that these created versions are the same as the original, but research shows they are not: You cannot duplicate naturally occurring nutrients from synthetic ingredients. In addition, they will be missing enzymes and cofactors required for assimilation. When I see “enriched” on a food label, I know to stay away.

The truth is that enriched foods do not add vital nutrients to our bodies, nor will synthetic vitamin pills. The best way to get what we need is from the whole food source. Nature intended us to eat vitamins, minerals, trace minerals and phytonutrients together as they work synergistically. When whole food supplements are made the right way, they maintain a multitude of the plants original components and the integrity of the food source. So eat as much good stuff as you can. Buy local when you can, organic if possible. But know that even then, most of us will still need to supplement with a whole food-based supplement to bridge the gap for long term health and wellness.

To your health!

Inger Pols
Editor of New England Health Advisory

P.S. As I mentioned at the top of today’s issue, we are always eager to hear from readers. Besides commenting on our articles, you can also connect with New England Health Advisory on Twitter and Facebook. “See” you there!