Supplements and the Micronutrient Problem

Animals in nature, including pre-industrial humans, get (or got) vitamins and minerals (and other micronutrients) on a seasonal basis. Our bodies stored them in our tissues to draw on in winter, droughts, and migratory periods, etc.

So the "minimum daily requirement" for micronutrients is a bit of a myth promulgated by two overlapping conditions: 1) the vast majority of us do not get sufficient nutrition from modern diets, and 2) there are companies that would sell us "solutions" to this problem in the form of pills, powders and potions...in other words, concentrated nutrients.

The problem with concentrated nutrients is that they may not work very well. More and more research is showing that isolated nutrients are not nearly as effective as "nested" nutrients, which is the nutrition that is contained in the whole foods that got us here to begin with...to the dawn of the industrial era, which in evolutionary terms was about 1 second ago.

This of course would not be very good news for the industries that have sprung up to provide us with concentrated nutrition.

Whole foods contain a vast and complex "set" of nutrients that apparently interact and support each other in ways we are only recently becoming aware of (on a research basis). Compounding this problem is the fact nutrition science has thus far proceeded on the supposition that testing the efficacy of isolated individual micronutrients will tell us all we need to know about them.

If this turns out not to be the case however we are left with the realization we don't know as much about nutrition as we thought, and further, we do not have an effective scientific (reductionist) method for testing the efficacy of a very complex set of "nested" nutrients in whole foods. All we really know to this point is the vitamin C in an apple seems to work much more efficiently in the human body than the same amount of isolated vitamin C. And so on, into the entire vast range of micro nutrition.

For a more complete discussion of this problem read "Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition" by T. Colin Campbell, one of today's leading research scientists in the field of nutrition, and founder of the T. Colin Campbell Center for Nutrition Studies at Cornell University.

http://nutritionstudies.org/

https://www.amazon.com/Whole-Rethinking-Nutrition-Colin-Campbell/dp/1939529840