In our modern-day society, we have certain stressors that our great-grandparents never even imagined. We fight five lanes of traffic on the way to jobs we hate, where companies try to squeeze more and more work out of us. We have to balance day-care schedules while we’re figuring out how to pay all our taxes as we try to avoid getting mugged going to the grocery store to buy our food, which is devoid of most of the nutrients our bodies require. At the same time, this food is laden with things that our bodies DON’T require—substances that only burden our physi-ology! Threat of terrorism, retirement planning, funding college educations, compliance with regulatory boards, work evalua-tions, employee/employer issues, paying property taxes, income tax, payroll tax, this tax, that tax, the tax on tax, etc., etc., take up almost all our conscious time.
Meanwhile, the dentist puts mercury fillings in our teeth because we have dental decay from all the excess refined sugars we consume, which we pick up at the gas station every time we pump gas in our car while inhaling the vapor of the gasoline and the exhaust of the cars pulling in and out of the station. The most exercise most of us get is pumping that gas while we inhale the fumes or picking up the remote as we get a beer during halftime or—the ultimate workout—pushing a shopping cart through a supermarket. All these intense daily stressors, with no exercise or outlet, make us feel as though we’re living inside a pressure cooker that’s going to explode any minute. The stress levels in our society are higher now than they’ve ever been.
The problem is that human beings were not meant to live this way. We’ve created an environment for ourselves that’s
completely unnatural. Our bodies were designed to process iso-lated occurrences of stress and then return to equilibrium. When a saber-toothed tiger approached a caveman, his adrenaline and cortisol would kick in, putting him in a “fight or flight” mode.
If he was lucky enough to escape, the caveman’s adrenal glands would eventually calm down and his system would return to bal-ance as if the incident had never even happened. Until the next time it happened.
In modern society, however, we’re in a chronically elevated state of stress. Instead of having a peak response and a return to baseline levels, we are in a constant state of stress, our cortisol lev-els constantly hovering way above baseline. Today, our poor diets, filled with high-fructose corn syrup in sodas and polyunsaturated fat–laden fast food, further stimulate the already increased insu-lin that results from the continuous cortisol thrashing our bodies are receiving. Both cortisol and insulin are proinflammatory sub-stances that cause great oxidative damage within the body. Real-izing this, we can clearly see why consistently elevated stress has led to so much chronic disease in our society, which didn’t exist just a few generations ago. The idea of “killer stress” is not just a metaphor. It’s really happening all around us.
A Solid Foundation
Without making the appropriate changes to decrease stress in your life, supplements are likely to do you little good. Remem-ber, healing starts from the inside out; whatever is happening in your mind is happening in your body. We’ll discuss some of these changes a bit later. In the meantime, it’s essential to ensure you get an adequate supply of nutrients. Obviously, the preferred
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method is to increase the quality of our food items. Unfortu-nately, the nutritional requirements needed to keep up with modern society’s demands prevent us from being able to con-sume that amount of food, making it necessary to supplement with good-quality B vitamins, organic-based minerals, clean and rancid-free fatty acids and high-potency antioxidants to counter-act any internal damage just from the stress of the modern daily carnage we refer to as life.
The foundation of any good supplemental program is a broad-spectrum multivitamin. A time-released vitamin will ensure that you don’t flush it all out in your urine within an hour. You can test your own vitamins for their absorption quality. Drop one in a glass of water. If it doesn’t dissolve completely within thirty to sixty minutes, you won’t be able to absorb it either. Choose one that best fits your age range and gender. Make sure you’re getting enough B vitamins in your multivitamin because B vitamins are the one imperative component you need when you’re under undue stress.
Buyer Beware Quality Control
Yes, even children need vitamins. Follow the same guidelines when choosing a supplement for your children. They may not be facing traffic jams in the morning, but they’re continuing to develop and grow, which requires a huge amount of quality nutrients. Children particularly need good essential fatty acid supplements that provide omega-3 and omega-6 oils for brain development. These include flaxseed, pumpkin seed and wal-nuts. These supplements come in liquid form, have little taste and can be easily added to other foods. NEVER use these oils for cooking, as they can become toxic when exposed to heat. Their healing power lies in their raw form. I also suggest using fish oil
and krill oil, but you have to make sure you’re getting these oils from a highly reputable source because mercury contamination is very common.
As with any product you buy, many supplements are not always as they seem. We all want the highest quality in anything we buy, but when it comes to your health, you cannot afford to be cutting corners. Obviously, everyone would rather drive a BMW than a Yugo, because there’s a big difference in performance. The performance range for nutritional supplements is actually even wider, mostly because it’s so difficult for consumers to tell what they’re getting. There are many brands to pick from, some pro-fessional and others over-the-counter. Most brands, however, you should simply avoid.
Many supplements don’t even contain their key ingredients.
As an example, a study done by the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Washington examined the fifteen top-selling brands of probiotics. Recall that these are the
“good” bacteria that populate your intestinal tract and provide you with a healthy immune system, among many other benefits.
Results showed that thirteen of the samples didn’t even contain a trace of the probiotics that they claimed to contain. Only two were found to contain partial ingredients of those listed on the label. Even worse, all except one contained a significant amount of contaminants.17
Even if the supplement actually does contain all the ingre-dients listed on the bottle, that doesn’t mean they are necessar-ily useful or beneficial. For instance, most active constituents in herbal products are highly fragile. Improperly growing, harvest-ing, processing and even transporting the ingredients can
signifi-17 See the Bastyr Center for Natural Health, http://bastyrcenter.org/
content/view/664/.
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cantly denature supplements, rendering them useless. I can hear your question coming. “Growing, harvesting and processing may harm herbal supplements, but what possible difference could transportation make?” If you want to find out, fill an unrefrig-erated truck with milk and drive across the state and see what happens. Transportation of supplements makes a huge differ-ence in their effectiveness and most of the ingredients in herbal supplements are traveling great distances, from places as far away as the rainforests of South America or China, not just a few hours away.
Batch testing is the only real way to determine if a supple-ment has all the listed ingredients and if those ingredients are in their “active” states. Sadly, most companies do not perform the necessary tests on their products, sometimes out of ignorance but usually due to cost constraints. Tests such as chromatogra-phy, electrophoresis and protein assays are some of the ways to determine the efficacy of the raw materials used to create these products. Because no one—including the manufacturers—really knows if a particular brand of a certain product works or not, consumers often end up having wildly different responses to seemingly the same product. Saint-John’s-wort is a terrific exam-ple. It’s is an herbal plant that grows primarily in North America, Europe and Russia.
Saint-John’s-wort had its fifteen minutes of fame about twenty years ago when the news media touted it as a natural cure for depression. People flocked to the product with very mixed results. Some had fantastic results, while others were completely unaffected. What was the difference? In the case of this herb, the time of the season when the plant is harvested makes a criti-cal difference, similar to picking an orange off the tree when it’s
still green. This subtle difference caused some brands to become popular while others weren’t as fortunate.
However, because few people realized this, Saint-John’s-wort was written off as “folk” medicine or an old wives’ tale. The fact is, if you get a good quality of Saint-John’s-wort it works more effectively than the counterpart pharmaceuticals, with no side effects and at considerably less cost. But the appropriate question to ask first before giving Saint-John’s-wort to someone would be what’s causing their symptom of depression in the first place?
A Delicate Balance
Supplements have a synergistic effect. This basically means that certain vitamins, minerals and herbs are more effective and work better in the presence of other vitamins, minerals and substances.
They work as a more effective team. Sometimes, they may even be dependent on other vitamins or minerals that may act as co-factors or catalysts in order to be properly utilized, absorbed or digested. For example, taking vitamin C with magnesium makes the magnesium more biologically available to your body. Another example is vitamin D and calcium. Without adequate vitamin D, calcium is not properly absorbed. This balance of elements needs to be taken into consideration when creating any supple-ment. Without the right combinations in the correct ratios, your supplement could literally run right through you and into the toilet or worse, could create relative deficiencies. More impor-tantly, at least from a financial perspective, your money will be going down the toilet as well. Good supplements aren’t cheap, so definitely make sure you’re getting your money’s worth.
Another example that illustrates the importance of balance is when someone is deficient in a particular vitamin or mineral.
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Often they’ll run to the health food store, sometimes even at the advice of their doctors, and grab a bottle of the specific item in which they’re deficient. But when supplementing our diets with a single element or improper ratios of elements, we can create a
“relative” imbalance that can have significant detrimental impli-cations on the overall physiological balance of the system. This improper usage could even result in a “relative” deficiency of an entirely different element. The ratio of vitamins and minerals in the body is like a combination lock to a safe. You need just the right amount to open the combination that allows all the systems to start functioning optimally and humming in perfect harmony.
For instance, it’s a common misconception that the major-ity of the population today is deficient in zinc. This is not nec-essarily true, however. It all depends upon the region where the individual lives and has previously lived, as well as the genetic predisposition for absorption, elimination and proper utiliza-tion of the mineral in quesutiliza-tion. Very often I see patients who are actually copper deficient but have sky-high zinc levels, contrary to this popular misconception. Residents of the southeastern United States, for example, routinely are found to have very high zinc levels but with deficient copper levels.18
The appropriate zinc-to-copper ratio in the human body ide-ally is maintained around 10:1, as measured in urine. Essentiide-ally, this means that for every ten zinc molecules, you need one copper molecule to have a perfect balance between these two particular
18 It is important to mention that copper and zinc, along with other minerals such as iron and selenium, are all metals that are essential for life.
The “metals” found to be necessary for life are commonly referred to as
“minerals.” However, very high levels of these essential minerals beyond a certain limit will cause them to act in the same detrimental manner as the toxic heavy metals, and induce the same damage through the process of oxidative damage.
minerals. In actuality, mineral balances are usually dependent on the relationships among any three minerals. To continue with our example, let’s say your zinc-to-copper ratio was balanced at 10:1 but your individual zinc levels were low when measured on their own. Because your zinc was low, you or your doctor begins to increase your zinc. You begin taking your zinc supplement as directed. As your zinc levels begin to rise and become normal (as measured individually), you induce a “relative” copper defi-ciency. In other words, as the zinc level rises, the ratio of zinc to copper increases, and now you only have one copper molecule for every twenty zinc molecules.
Simply telling a patient to supplement with an element in which they might be deficient can often create these “relative”
deficiencies in other areas. Unfortunately, most physicians and health-care professionals tend to overlook this fact. With few exceptions, vitamins and minerals should be taken with food or immediately after meals to allow for maximum absorption.
In addition, live-source ingredients are hundreds of times better and far more effective than synthetically derived or inor-ganic versions found in most of the supplements you could take.
Without going into too much detail, the live-source products have a biophotonic (body of light) frequency that is exclusively found in once-living things. This biophotonic resonance matches our own human energy signature and makes the end product far more utilizable and able to assimilate into our own physiology.
There’s an entire course I teach based on this concept, marry-ing quantum physics with medical science, but that’s a subject for another book. More information on this course is provided in the resources section at the end of this book. For now, let’s just say that medical science and nutrition will change radically in the
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coming years—particularly as people discover what their bodies truly need.