I know the majority of you have been sold something that was so amazing it was going to change your life, make you the most beautiful person in the world. Making you lean and gorgeous! They sell us with the hope of a pill doing a magical transformation and all I have to do is take it!!! Okay, taking a pill won't solve everything. The next issue is that most of what you are taking is full of chemicals and synthetic vitamins that can not be delivered appropriately anyway. Am I saying don't take supplements? No. Am I saying you need to understand what you are taking, the point of taking them, and what is good and bad about them? Yes!
I do not believe that someone who is sick or imbalanced can just change their diet and solve it all. Due to depleted soils and chemicals in foods. Plus a toxic environment all around us. We use supplements because it is hard to get the variety of vitamins and minerals in the diet in the amounts we need. Plus with all the processed food and chemicals we are getting depleted of the nutrients we need.
I have had the luxury of having an abundance of training from different supplement companies and how they create their supplements. Many claim whole food and yes they start from a whole food yet they have pulled only a specific part of that whole food out. Which turns it into a synthetic and they clump it into a high dose of specific vitamins or chemicals. Which, the medical industry has taught you to look for a certain milligram of a specific vitamin or mineral. Which all sounds good we need a certain amount to meet our RDA (Recommended Daily Allowance). Yet it is pushing the wrong concept. Everyone is looking for one vitamin in a high dose when really we should be adding foods with that vitamin in those foods. The absorption of food versus chemicals is very different.
Your body needs a combination of things to get specific vitamins and minerals into the body. So if you do not have the other needed combination, which can be a variety of things depending on what you are trying to increase, your body will not be able to use that vitamin. Whole foods will have the cofactors where synthetic supplements will usually not.
Even in foods if you are eating food to get specific nutrients if your digestive system isn't working correctly you may not even be getting out of it what you need. For example protein, your stomach has to be acidic enough to open up the protein and trigger the pancreas for enzymes to digest it to have it benefit you. If you do not have this happening you will only get very foul-smelling gas, which benefits no one.
Now let's break this down when looking for supplements first where it is sourced from is important so you will want to look at the company and where they are sourcing their products. China is usually a no cause they have a lot of toxins, if we are looking at fish you want them from clean waters. This may take some work on your part but it is worth it.
Organic is key for plants and animals you want them to feed what is natural to them, free-range or cage-free is important. It is hard to get organic animals if they are free-range or cage-free. For example, if the chicken is cage-free they are eating bugs and worms from the ground there is no way to really make sure the bugs are clean from chemicals. We want them to eat what they would naturally due to this is how their digestion works if they are getting feed foods unnatural to them there are issues of infection and imbalance in the animal. If the animal eats foods like hay and grains they can be organically fed. Plants need clean soil filled with minerals so they can absorb them and provide them to you.
How things are processed is important also. Many supplement manufacturers realize this and will use it as part of their advertising unless they are doing it wrong. In generic most things, you want a low heat process. Bones often have a quick high heat, so like bone broth. Plants it is important to open up the plant to get nutrients out of it, with proteins unraveling amino acids, doing a low heat so that we do not denature (kink) the protein. Helping with digestive enzymes in the supplement or doing predigesting factors like fermenting and sprouting with plants are used often. We want living high vibration food not overheated and destroyed foods.
Next plant versus animal, for the most part, plants are used for vitamins and minerals. The animal is used for healthy fats, B vitamins, and amino acids. It takes a lot of knowledge and work to use plants for amino acids and rebuild. Animals if raised correctly have eaten the plants and also taken in the minerals and vitamins that get absorbed into their tissue, so when we eat them we get the benefit of both plant and animal.
Vitamins if you are buying stand-alone vitamins you need to make sure you are not causing another imbalance. Taking an abundance of vitamin D you can cause calcium to be pulled from the bones and kidneys to be calcified. Taking high doses of one specific amino acid can cause an imbalance of the rest of the amino acids needed to rebuild other organs in the body. Taking a high dose of one specific B vitamin can imbalance the rest of the B's in the body.
This is another reason taking supplements that are legit whole food rather than starting from whole food and just pulling one part so it can be high dose in one specific part is important. Taking a high dose for a short period can be helpful but you should have help from a practitioner or someone who has worked with people to get results. You need to monitor this and make sure you are not causing other imbalances.
Each of us needs to look at what it is we are adding and see if we are feeding and nourishing with our supplements or if we are dumping money down the drain. Getting vitamins with a variety of chemicals may be further damage the body. I would love to help you through a scan or survey. I know this is all a lot of information and it is great to have a guide. This is why I offer my $25 membership to offer a cheap way of getting guided through selecting what is best for you while learning to read and understand supplements and food.