The Roadmap to Choosing Supplements
By bestselling author Raymond Francis
In April 1998, the National Academy of Sciences issued a statement saying that most people can no longer get all the nutrients they need, even if they eat a good diet made up of lots of fruits and vegetables. In June of 2002, a landmark study analyzing 36 years of data in the Journal of the American Medical Association concluded that every American needs at least a daily multivitamin regardless of age or health.
Intensive industrial farming, the use of artificial fertilizers, and poor crop rotation practices have left our soils depleted. In addition, today, our food is harvested before it is ripe so it can be shipped, but this reduces the nutritional content by as much as 80 percent. For example, spinach loses 60 percent of its folic acid in three days.
Add to this, the typical factory-produced, low-quality foods we get at supermarkets and restaurants is tragically far from the kind of food that can supply our cells with all the nutrients they need to provide us with good health.
It has been estimated that our ancestors consumed three to four times more nutrients than we get today. Yet the decline in the nutrient quality of our food is only half the reason why supplementation is needed. The other reason is that changes in our environment and lifestyle make our need for nutrients higher than ever. For example, the chlorine in our water, ozone in our air and many other environmental pollutants create an oxidizing environment that requires unprecedented amounts of antioxidants to neutralize. Indeed, studies have shown that our need for antioxidants has tripled since 1970. Meanwhile the antioxidant level in foods has been cut in half!
You can get the nutrition you need by learning how to eat a good diet of fresh, whole, organic foods and by learning how to select supplements that do what they are supposed to do and are worth what you pay for them.
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