Sorting The Supplements
I am getting ready for my workshop for Monday night with my 60 Day Turnaround Group… sorting the supplements. Good material to share with the world, so I figured, why not make it my Daily Sprout for the day. When we discuss sorting the supplements, we are talking about the base need for your daily nutrition.
Notice the term BASE. The key to pursuing health from a nutritional standpoint is to stay focused on the basic needs. I commonly have consultation patients who are pursuing many random directions for their nutrition. They have picked up tidbits here and there, so they say things like “I have a pretty good diet” and “I take a lot of supplements”…
To which my knee-jerk response is, “can you explain what a pretty good diet is?” and “why would you ever take a lot of supplements when God has put food on the earth?”
Now, I get that at first it could be confusing… sorting the supplements, and I pretty much just threw them under the bus. But the key here is that everybody needs a plan, a semblance of organization… not haphazard pursuits. You read an article here about calcium, there about vitamin D, this magazine about turmeric, and that internet blog about elderberry. Before you know it you have a “medicine chest” of supplements. But you take them like a drug, no focus on building a base of health, but trying to out nutrition your symptoms.
To me it sounds just like the medical model wrapped up in a different pill.
Not God’s plan.
So let’s come back to the base. The base is you, identifying that there is a certain amount of healthy food that needs to go into the body, and that after that, there should likely be some focused supplementation on shoring up the base. Not based out of fear of a symptom… really, do you think a symptom means you are sick, or are you simply fighting the way you should fight?
I work off of 13 servings of fruit and vegetables a day (an open handful constitutes a handful), which should be divided into 10 vegetables and 3 fruits. When you fall short of that, don’t choose a “mined and processed” multi-vitamin, choose harvested food, juiced and dehydrated. Juice Plus is the foremost supplement on the planet for a reason, and that reason is research coupled with simplicity. 10 years, and I don’t miss making up my deficiency from 13 in any given day.
Order here – http://hsprout.juiceplus.com/us/en
Next, Vitamin D is needed, because you cannot make it up from your diet. You make it from sunshine interacting with your body, which requires sunshine. Any day where you are under 3o minutes of sunshine exposure on your arms head and neck, would require supplementation from 2500 – 10,000 IU’s per day, depending on your current blood levels of Vitamin D. There are plenty of good brands out there, but I really like Pure Pharma, if nothing else, for the coconut oil coupled with Vitamin D3. This is one of my recommendations, find a Vit. D3 with coconut oil.
Omega 3 – I cannot possibly give you the detail that I would want to in this sprout, as for me, this is better as a visual and audible education. But, the key is that in a given day, if you are pushing for 2-5 grams of Omega 3, the best way to get there would be to consume a high level of nuts and seeds in your daily diet that are rich in O-3, such as pumpkin seeds, chia seeds and flax seeds. The Omega 3 in these foods will provide a good base of O-3 every day, making supplementation unnecessary in many cases.
And lastly, probiotics. Everybody needs probiotics. 200 billion per day is a good number to shoot for, and with that, eating that number would be your first choice, and supplementation a second choice for sure.
I hope you can begin to thin out your drawer of supplements, and move in a direction of just the right ones to give the base. Trust the body, and don’t freak out!!
Be well and Be blessed! – Dr. E