Supplements & Powders

This week we look at dietary supplements, a £200 billion pound industry and growing. We love our quick fixes and supplements are no exception. Just take a minute to browse the supplement catalog from any major supplement brand such as Solgar and you’ll quickly realise that you don’t know half the names of them; N-acetylcysteine? Alpha-Lipoic Acid? Betaine? What the…

The question is which ones are worth taking and which ones might you actually need. We’re all human guinea pigs in the supplement experiment, no one really knows what the long term affects are of taking specific supplements, particularly high doses. For example, vitamin A can be quite hard on the old liver if you take too much. Most vitamins at the higher dosage scale simply go in one end and come out at the other and that’s certainly the case for vitamin C. Your toilet will be thanking you every time you have a synthetic based multi-vitamin I assure you.

What we forget is that most supplements on the market are artificially made compounds which can be difficult for your body to naturally absorb, let alone utilise. If you take a multi-vitamin for example, you’ll see all the vitamins on the label but then you will see in parenthesis next to them strange chemical names. A classic example would be vitamin C as absorbic acid or vitamin D as ergocalciferol. Straight ancient Aztec language if you ask me. These chemical isolates are not technically vitamins; vitamins are very complicated things made up of enzymes, co-enzymes and co-factors that go into making a vitamin in the body. Manufacturers single out the most stable forms of each vitamin for use in the pill, although people do occasionally have stomach problems taking in these synthetic compounds because they aren’t exactly ‘au naturel’.

Now there’s nothing particularly bad about this but its important to remember that they aren’t everything they say they are. This is why I’m much more of an advocate of food based powders instead (either loose or in a supplement) that you can add into water or juice or at least food state multi-vitamins. This way, you let your body do what its designed to do by taking the food and breaking it down into its constitute parts. For example, going back to the vitamin C, A single tiny Amla fruit is equivalent in vitamin C content to two oranges! Another example is taking a kelp capsule which can provide a reasonable dose of iodine, essential for thyroid function. Other more notable food based powders such as green powders contain a whole spectrum of vitamins and minerals and are worth taking now and then given our lack of greens. You don’t have to take much and you probably won’t want to anyway. Just get your nose over a jar of Spirulina and you’ll soon find out why. That being said, green powders such as Chlorella and Spirulina also work to maintain our maximal oxygen uptake which in this day in age shouldn’t go underrated.

Now obviously there are times where taking a generic supplement is necessary such as if you’re recovering from an illness and need that extra help. One common illness we suffer from is being hungover. In this situation you should most definitely give your liver an extra hand. You wouldn’t run a marathon and then not consume some form of a recovery drink or meal after. Well, the same goes for your liver. It’s just taken a battering and for you to not even treat it to a mere B-Complex vitamin is just cruel. B-Vitamins are water soluble and they get flushed out of you when you consume alcohol. One before and after your night will be much appreciated. If you’re feeling particularly generous to your largest organ, you can throw in a milk thistle too. I generally feel most people would benefit from taking a B-complex regardless of their current state; B vitamins are used up when we’re stressed and most of us generally are.

More specifically, the one we might all want to be taking is B12 which although gets more rep in the vegetarian domain shouldn’t be dismissed by the meat eaters. It has a key role in the normal functioning of the brain and nervous system and if you’re deficient you might even have a bit of brain fog. Despite the fact that B12 can be found in eggs and meat, many meat eaters are suspected to be borderline deficient. This is because the animals we consume are no longer roaming free in the fields where the glorious B12 can be found. B12 is synthesized by bacteria and is therefore found in areas of bacterial growth, namely dirt and soil. Cattle aren’t feeding so much on grass and chickens do not peck in the dirt on factory farms. To add to this, pesticides often kill B12 producing bacteria and insects in the soil.

So far we’ve discussed the supplement industry, taking supplements for recovery and some which are more notable than others but how does this apply to the world we are in now? For the majority of us, we are deficient in almost every single vitamin and mineral. It’s pretty outstanding the vast discrepancies between optimum amounts and actual intake. Some minerals such as zinc, magnesium and selenium have taken a a real hit over the years. Most of us are down 75% below ‘ideal levels’. That being said, no one truly knows what the ‘optimum amount’s of these things are, although we are most definitely nearer the end of the scale where symptoms would appear in deficiency tests. This huge wave of deficiency is down to our diet of processed foods, poor soil quality from industrial farming (as mentioned briefly above), lack of adequate fresh food and veg, cooking habits (BBQ’ing etc which de-natures food) and the storage of food (room temperature isn’t great for your foods nutrient retention).

With all this happening, should we all be taking a supplement regime? Whilst I don’t feel completely comfortable recommending specific amounts of vitamins and minerals or brands because each of us has a very different diet and lifestyle, I will say its worth taking some each week. For example, every week take a few teaspoons of an organic green based powder such as chlorella and 3 - 5 food state B-complex supplement. This would be a reasonable baseline but there’s obviously plenty more you can take to go above and beyond.

Matt Jarosy