What vitamins should you take?

Our consultant: Ksenia Mikhailova, DIHom, Jerusalem.

Ksenia Mikhailova (Bogoslovskaya) ‘s Journal

1. Is it impossible to live without vitamins?

The first and main question that invariably interests supporters of a natural lifestyle is why, in fact, you need to take vitamins – is it not possible to get all the necessary substances from quality food?

Only it is impossible to get everything you need from foodand there are several reasons for this. Many vitamins are destroyed during storage, especially when stored in a refrigerator, many are destroyed during heat treatment, many are decomposed from the effects of chemicals used to process vegetables and fruits.

But even if we assume that you grow all the fruits and vegetables yourself, pluck them right from the garden and carry them to the table, do not store in the refrigerator and eat them raw immediately after cutting – even under all these circumstances it will be difficult for you to get the right amount of vitamins and minerals, if you do not live in the Himalayas, because polluted air, water and earth require a huge amount from your body antioxidants.

2. And how did our ancestors live?

I must say that they did not live well – at least in terms of the provision of vitamins. And as a result, they are much more severely tolerated inflammatory diseases and more often they died from them.

In my experience, the reduction in infant mortality from so-called childhood diseases should not be attributed in any way to vaccination (vaccinated children become infected with what they were vaccinated from, no less often than unvaccinated ones), but improving nutrition and hygiene.

Children began to get much more vegetables and fruits in any season – and this played a significant role in reducing deaths from inflammatory diseases. I am deeply convinced that if they get even more vitamin C, for example (within reasonable limits, of course), then colds and flu will decrease, and allergies, too.

There were no cars and factories then, so our ancestors did not have to cope with the terrible pollution of the environment, as well as with stress, from which almost no one can protect themselves today, neither with pesticides, nor with many other circumstances of our life.

And if we look at the same example with vitamin C again, we will see that to neutralize all of the above it is required in large quantities, and man is not a dog and does not know how to synthesize it in the body. And I’m afraid that in the next few millennia it will not learn – such mutations do not happen quickly.

The conversation about ancestors can be continued for a long time, so I will dwell on what has been said, adding one more, extremely curious and even funny argument, which usually does not occur to anyone: before, people ate much more than us.

And the word “much” is not an exaggeration here – I am afraid that today there are hardly many people who can at least simply digest and assimilate the diet of a medieval monk, which consisted of about 7000 calories!

A modern person needs iron digestion to cope with so much food and get all the nutrients from it, not to mention the fact that this person is unlikely to live long – very soon he will die from the consequences of severe obesity.

Meanwhile, in the Middle Ages, people ate this way, and if you consider that for every calorie eaten there were vitamins, minerals, proteins and fatty acids (they ate, as you understand, not pure sugar), then it is not surprising that all this came the body is incomparably more.

Today we have lost the ability to utilize such an amount of energy and digest such an amount of food, so even the usual daily intake of vitamin E, which requires eating 1000 kcal of high-quality vegetable oils every day, is simply not available to us. This is how vitamin E deficiency occurs.

3. What vitamins and how to choose?

Having said all the good things that can be said about vitamins, let’s start saying the bad things, and there are a lot of bad things to say.

The problem is that people have not been producing multivitamins that long ago, so there is no perfect method. Let’s hope that in a few decades no chemicals will be involved in the production of vitamins, but today we have to be content with what we have and choose the best available. The pros still outweigh the cons.

We often hear that there are no natural vitamins – they are, they say, still produced chemically. This is both true and false. Yes, indeed, to isolate a vitamin from raw materials, one has to resort to chemical processes, but the fact is that the resulting product is still closer to what is in vegetables than the vitamin originally synthesized in the laboratory. And firms that make natural vitamins are constantly looking for new processing methods to bring the result as close as possible to its natural form. None of this is done by pharmaceutical companies that produce synthetic vitamin substitutes.

I will give only two examples: all the same vitamins C and E. Synthetic ascorbic acid, as you know, does not take part in most processes in which natural is involved, and with vitamin E the situation is even worse – if you take only one species from the group of vit. E, alpha-tocopherol, which, in fact, is synthesized, and not the entire group of tocopherols and tocotrienols, then a deficiency of gamma-tocopherol is formed, and it is he who prevents heart disease. Natural supplement companies have known this for a long time, which is why quality natural E supplements are always a whole group of tocopherols.

How to distinguish natural from synthetic?

If the jar does not say “100% natural”, which is highly desirable, then you can look at the exact names of the compounds. Never buy a multivitamin whose exact composition is not prescribed! “Iron”, for example, is not a composition, it is a bad joke. The composition in this case is indicated by either “Ferrous sulfate” (synthetic) or “Ferrous bisglycinate” (natural). In the same way, the inscription “Vitamin A” can tell us only one thing – that we are being laughed at; information is provided by either “Retinol acetate” (in synthetic vitamin) or “Retinol palmitate” (in natural).

Please note that multivitamins differ sharply in dosage as well – in one you will see 1.5 mg of vitamin B2, and in the other – 50 mg. Agree, even completely unenlightened citizens can understand from just one figure that these two vitamins are not the same. Ideally, dosages should be adjusted by your doctor, homeopath or naturopath, but if you don’t have one, then follow the manufacturer’s recommendations – good companies usually give at least primitive explanations as to which multivitamin is best for whom. And when they try to sell you pollen or honey in the form of a multivitamin, then pay attention not only to what vitamins and minerals are there, but also to how many there are – and you will see that there are … almost none.

For the same reason, you should never, under any circumstances, buy products that are distributed through multilevel marketing – they regularly find any prohibited components and various scandals regularly occur, but sales continue, because it is very profitable, even taking into account the costs of litigation. These products are not properly monitored and are dangerous to use!

And one more recommendation, which usually does not appear anywhere: if you have the opportunity to choose between a multivitamin, which is taken one tablet a day, and one that requires taking three tablets, then the choice must be made extremely non-standard – choose three tablets a day. This is a better product. The fact is that water-soluble vitamins are flushed out of the body within two hours, so the more often you take them and the smaller the individual doses, the more benefits you will get from them.

4. Recommended daily allowance

The RDA (Recommended Daily Allowance) is the scourge of those who have to explain why the can says “5000% of the recommended dose.” Unfortunately, for some reason people do not understand the simple explanation poorly: RDA is the minimum of a substance, the minimum without which a person gets sick and dies. For example, without 60 mg. vitamin C, a person has every chance of contracting scurvy. But in order to be healthy, he needs not 60 mg, but tens and hundreds of times more of this vitamin. That is why a high-quality multivitamin contains hundreds and thousands of percent of the RDA.

You can write about RDA for a long time – about when and under what circumstances these standards were established (some – during the First World War, since which both in the world and in science something has changed), about how they changed and etc. I will only say that RDA is the minimum standard fit for survival, and the difference between survival and health is the same as the difference between 200 grams. camp rations of bread with gruel and a full lunch.

In conclusion, I will add only one thing: a multivitamin does not replace or exclude good nutrition, fresh food, preferably organically grown and prepared with gentle methods. Remember this!