With ever growing dietary preferences this day and age, the complications with daily allowances, and the ability to satisfy your bodys’ requirement for crucial vitamins and minerals is becoming more and more of a struggle. Companies are sprouting up once again sounding off about how their product is the holy grail, and the next best thing to help you meet the dietary demands your body makes on a day to day basis.

The big ones we see people constantly try to boost are Vitamin B (in a whole manner of variants), Vitamin C, and Vitamin D. Supplement companies are coming up with products that ooze the things you supposedly need on a day to day basis, and it is on the strength of these ingredients that they sell the product whilst failing to make a point of the other ingredients in the product you don’t need.

The way supplements are supposed to work is, that you the consumer, takes an addition alongside something you’re already consuming. For example, if you eat one satsuma in a day, it isn’t going to give enough Vitamin C to satisfy or uphold your bodys’ daily requirement. This would be where you the consumer might take a Vitamin C supplement just to push you up into RDI (recommended daily intake) territory. That as I said is a very loose example, because there are countless things in the majority of an individuals day to day diet that will contain enough of what you need.

As we have explained before everything (almost) we require to function is in our food. It (again almost) certainly has to be because the replacements people seem to favour, and the fashionable supplements people keep buying into are obviously made into a concentrated format which is easy to consume or administer, whether that is in a tablet form or as we’ve seen and heard of more recently, injections.

The funny thing and a real difference between macro nutrients (Protein, Carbs and Fats) and micro nutrients (vitamins and minerals) is that despite appearing similar by concept at face value, actually behave completely differently in our body. If we consume too much of any one macro nutrient we gain weight, this is because the surplus calorie intake is broken down into sugar and stored in the body to later be used as energy as, and when our body is placed into a situation that dictates the use of stored energy. If we consume more micro nutrients than we require, we simply dispose of it in our urine and sweat. Like macro nutrients, micro nutrients each have their own job within our highly complex body, and each vitamin mixes (in simple terms) with a particular mineral which we also source from whole foods we may consume to create a chemical reaction. This chemical reaction can be the difference in how energised you feel, or how you feel with your mood, or how well rested or focused you may feel. If our deficient in some vitamins the only real way of knowing is by having blood tests to see, and only then can you act in the proper manner with regard to closing the gap and ironing out any imbalances.

Ultimately this point for me is where I disagree with supplementation of a multivitamin because I dare suggest the majority taking a multi vitamin supplement will be doing so on the back of some tripe article distributed in the fake news arenas around the internet. If you’re deficient in a particular vitamin, and you take on a multi vitamin supplement, you’ll increase the net intake of vitamins as opposed to closing the gap or iron out the deficiency. Also, without the blood test its impossible to say whether it is the vitamin or the mineral part of the team you’re down on. As humans, we need vitamin D to chemically react with calcium to provide energy, and help develop strong bone and connective tissue. This means that if you’re hammering the calcium and you’re not getting out into broad daylight for 30 minutes per day, the chances are you’re not going stimulate the chemical reaction we’re talking about.

I know vitamin supplements aren’t particularly expensive but, it is an unnecessary expense. We really can achieve the consumption of vitamins and minerals from our food, whatever your preference to your diet is. In actual fact, the majority of vitamins most people could be deficient in are in fresh fruit and vegetables, that are grown from the ground. This isn’t a pop at the vegetarian or vegan culture, but seemingly companies boasting like for like nutrient values when it comes to their meat replacement or substituted products are in place and have developed their products around vegetarian and vegan lifestyles. It really isn’t my place to say what an individual should eat, and why but I don’t like people being lead around the houses in the quest for a sturdy and sufficient nutritious diet.

I think this topic is up there with food labelling. Its a rabbit hole full of bullsh*t if you don’t know what you’re looking for, but I can guarantee what you’re looking for isn’t bullsh*t.

How can the majority of people require supplementation, when their diets are the keystone of their problem. Poor diet means low vitamin and mineral intake, low energy output due to low chemical function in the body. Mood swings, feeling lethargic and depleted on a regular basis… none of that is going to be cured by the addition of a supplement, without putting the other interventions in place as well.