Medicine and Supplements

Is Medicine and Supplements a good solution for our Health?

Stefan Schmitt

July 26 2020

When we step into the world of medicine and supplements, we get into a world of controversy. There are many factors to consider.

When it comes to medicine, we have several factors that need to be considered.

The genetics of humans are often very different and therefore each individual must be a specific case in itself. To date, we have no guarantee that medicine will work for everyone. This is where the number of side effects comes in and the number is small. But do we know for sure?

There are also diseases and genetic defects in the world today that are caused by humans. These require the specific medicine or nutritional supplements man-made since nature was not involved, but there may be a natural treatment that we need to examine more closely and the spectrum of nature is wide.

The FDA (Food and Drug Administration) is the agency in the U.S. to approve a drug if it works and can treat disease, but we have also recently seen many cases of FDA-approved drugs that are now being tried in court and being sued by lawyers from side effects to causes of death.

Confidence in the pharmaceutical industry’s drugs is once again a risk and not guaranteed.

We should all agree that natural medicine or nutrition should always be our first and if possible, our only option.

Supplements must be checked separately in six categories.

Natural source:

These include nutrients from vegetable, animal or mineral sources. But before making it into the supplement bottle, they undergo significant processing and refining. Examples include vitamin D from fish liver oils, vitamin E from vegetable oils, and natural beta-carotene.

When a vitamin is marked “natural”, it only has to include 10% of actual natural plant-derived ingredients. The other 90% could be synthetic

Nature-identical synthetic:

This includes nutrients completely manufactured in a lab with the molecular structure identical to the same nutrients occurring in nature. Manufacturers often prefer this process because of the cost and scarcity of natural resources. Most standard vitamin supplements on the market today are this type.

An example here would be vitamin C. Most vitamin C currently manufactured is synthetic, coming from China. Vitamin C is a weak acid. Many supplements use salt forms (sodium ascorbate, calcium ascorbate, magnesium ascorbate) to decrease acidity.

The most popular form of synthetic vitamin C is ascorbic acid. Naturally occurring vitamin C is the same molecule as synthetic ascorbic acid. But in food, ascorbic acid is found within the vitamin C complex among other compounds. The ascorbic acid in supplements is often derived from corn starch, corn sugar, or rice starch, and is chemically dependent upon volatile acids.

Strictly synthetic:

These nutrients are manufactured in a lab and are different than the same nutrients found in nature. Synthetic vitamins can have the same chemical constituents, but still have a different shape (optical activity).

Food cultured:

This involves the same process behind cultured foods like yogurt, kefir, miso, and sauerkraut. Nutrient supplements are often grown in yeast or algae. Culturing in and of itself creates nutrients and can make them more bioavailable.

Raw materials (minerals and some synthetic nutrients) are added to yeast/algae suspensions where they concentrate within cells. The yeast/algae are then harvested, ruptured, and made into a vitamin supplement. The theory here is that yeast/algae contain the nutrients they’re fed in a whole food complex.

Sometimes food cultured vitamins are combined with synthetic vitamins to increase potency (i.e., to bump up the milligram/microgram count on the label), since most have a low potency on their own. Remember, counting the milligrams of a synthetic vitamin might not be comparable to what’s found in whole foods.

Food based:

One kind of food based supplement is made by enzymatically reacting synthetic and natural vitamins with extracts containing vegetable proteins and then making this into a supplement. This is not food cultured, because the nutrients are not grown into a whole food, as in the yeast/algae suspensions.

Bacterial fermentation:

This includes nutrients produced by genetically altering bacteria. Genetically altered bacteria can produce nutrient by-products.

For instance, vitamin D2 is made by artificially irradiating fungus. It’s not a naturally occurring form of vitamin D. The starting material is ergosterol, a type of plant sterol derived from fungal cell membranes. Ergosterol is turned into viosterol by ultraviolet light, and then converted into ergocalciferol (vitamin D2).

With all of the data regarding nutrition and optimal health, the most convincing information tells us to focus on what we eat — not what we get from a pill bottle.

Synthetic vitamin supplements are isolated man-made chemical compounds, and appear to be in the same class as other synthetic pharmaceuticals.

But in a situation where it is possible to get nutrients from whole foods, choosing a supplement instead doesn’t seem to promote health, and taking supplements may actually cause harm.

NIH State-of-the-Science Conference Statement on Multivitamin/Mineral Supplements and Chronic Disease Prevention!

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17332802/

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