What Are the Best Supplements to Use

This is not about a specific product or brand. For the past 50 years, Americans have been using vitamin/mineral supplements more and more. Yet these people have gotten fatter and sicker also. Fatness and sickness go together. As society's obesity rate climbs, so does the type 2 diabetes climb. People need to try to get their nutrition from food, not pills. Many tablets pass through the digestive tract without being digested. You can even get vitamins from soft drinks like Diet Coke Plus.

The nutrition from food is very different from the nutrition in supplements, regardless of the source. The FDA does not allow more than 99 mg of potassium in a supplement. If you go to a nutritionist/doctor, they will never give you more than 200 mg of potassium since you may need to be rushed to the hospital. But it is okay to eat 2 avocados which contain 2,400 mg of potassium. Four potatoes contain 3,200 mg of potassium and 4 bananas contain 1,600 of potassium and these are good to eat. In fact, the FDA says to decrease sodium and increase potassium consumption.

Vitamins and minerals cost pennies to make. They are either made with chemicals or extracted with chemical reactions. They do not exist in nature this way. If you consume too much vitamin A or D it can cause death from liver failure. So many nutritionists avoid them. Instead many of them use greens drinks, like the authors of the best selling nutritional book, Fit for Life. There are Greens Plus, Vitamineral Greens (by Health Force), Green Vibrance (by Vibrant Health), Perfect Food (by Garden of Life), Miracle Greens and many others.

A major ingredient in the greens drinks is spirulina. It is a sea plant (phytoplankton or blue-green algae). Spirulina has more calcium than milk, more protein than meat or soybeans, more beta-carotene than carrots, more vitamin E than wheat germ, more iron than spinach and more vitamin B-12 than liver. This is why it is known as a super food. The greens drinks contain other super foods and other whole foods, instead of isolated chemicals like vitamins and minerals. The human body was designed to consume foods, not isolated chemicals.

Unlike with vitamin/mineral supplements, people feel a difference when drinking greens drinks. Some of them taste very good. They also contain superfoods like barley grass, wheat grass and alfalfa grass. The above ingredients are green since that is the color of chlorophyll. It is the blood of the plant. The structure of chlorophyll is just like the molecular structure of your blood except your blood has a copper atom at the center of the molecule whereas the plant blood has an iron atom at the center of the molecule. Chlorophyll has a cleansing and healing effect on the human body. Some of these also have some vegetables in them like carrots, beets or spinach.

There are about 15 vitamins and 70 minerals. But there are thousands of phytochemicals in plants that are beneficial to people. One of them is lycopene that is in red grapefruits, watermelon and tomatoes. It helps circulation and cancer prevention. Another is resveratrol which also helps circulation and prevention of cancer. This is in grapes and grape juice so mix the greens drinks powders with diluted grape juice so you also get resveratrol. This is the famous nutrient that is in red wine that they mention on the news so that you will give wine to your little kids. But it is not in the alcohol, but in the grape.

Another great thing about these greens drinks is the grasses are dried without heat so they contain a very large amount of enzymes. There are no enzymes in cooked foods since all enzymes are destroyed by cooking. So instead of adding more chemicals to your body, you can add the healthiest foods or superfoods to your diet. It is common that after people drink their first glass of greens drink, they have a strong craving for another glass of it. Go ahead, that means your body needs it. Copyright 2007 by Chuck Bluestein. www.phifoundation.org

Chuck Bluestein is a nutritionist, ethnobotanical herbalist and a master faster. His website has info on Nutrition colds and flus, losing weight (including water weight), healthy diet, fasting, natural cures, Enlightenment and how to be happier.