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Vitamins and Supplements / What are Vitamins?
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The word "vitamin" was coined in 1911 by the Warsaw-born biochemist Casimir Funk (1884-1967). At the Lister Institute in London, Funk isolated a substance that prevented nerve inflammation (neuritis) in chickens raised on a diet deficient in that substance. He named the substance "vitamine" because he believed it was necessary to life and it was a chemical amine. The "e" at the end was later removed when it was recognized that vitamins need not be amines.
Essential to life, these thirteen organic compounds perform dozens of vital jobs in the body. Vitamin entered our vocabulary only in 1912, when the first one thiamin or B1 was isolated. We now know that some of the devastating diseases of the past beriberi, rickets, scurvy were nothing more than acute vitamin deficiencies. To prevent future deficiencies, the Food and Nutrition Board of the National Academy of Sciences devised Recommended Dietary Allowances, the daily amounts of the different food nutrients considered adequate for healthy individuals. These figures are updated every five to ten years, the last update being 1989. But if you clicked on the link to recommended dietary allowances, you read that the definition is far from adequate in determining individual needs.
The "book" on vitamins is far from complete. Research continues and few scientists doubt that new vitamins, even new roles for existing vitamins, will surface. There are 13 vitamins now known: vitamin A, vitamin B1, vitamin B2 (riboflavin), niacin, vitamin B6 (pyridoxine), vitamin B12 (cobalamin), folic acid, pantothenic acid, biotin, vitamin C, vitamin D, vitamin E, and vitamin K. For a detailed description of all of the vitamins, go here.
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| Vitamins are essential to life | |
Vitamins-they captivate, and they cure. Or so people say.
Few newspaper headlines grab a person's attention faster than those describing the often "miraculous" benefits of vitamins. Are they as good as they've been cracked up to be?
The answer, in a nutshell, is yes. Each year, now, thousands of medical journal articles report new findings related to vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients. But it's also easy to become overwhelmed and confused by all the information. What follows are answers to some basic questions about vitamins and other supplements.
There are a number of reasons. Despite official proclamations that Americans have the best food supply in the world, (we actually have the largest not the best) large number of people don't obtain sufficient amounts of essential nutrients.
One reason is most people simply don't select very nutritious foods. For example, do you eat the five officially recommended daily servings of fruit and vegetables? According to researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, only an estimated 9 percent of people do.
Another reason relates to extensive food handling and processing that reduces vitamin levels from the farm to the fork. Several years ago, U.S. Department of Agriculture researchers found that conventional nitrogen fertilizer reduced vitamin C levels in some food crops by as much as one-third. Further nutrient losses have been documented during the transportation, storage, and processing of produce and during repeated heating and cooling. So even if your intentions are good, you won't walk out of a supermarket with nutritious foods. Furthermore, processed foods (those foods whose vitamins and minerals are removed for manufacturing purposes), remove the majority of minerals and minerals that we need for good health. The Rutger's Study confirms this.
Nutritional surveys have found that 50 percent of Americans consume less than 50 mg. and 25 percent consume less than 39 mg. of vitamin C daily-far below the Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA) of 60 mg. Furthermore, studies have found that half of the population consumes only 950 IU of vitamin A (19 percent of the RDA), and 4 IU of vitamin E (40 percent of the RDA) or less daily. The same pattern applies to the consumption of other micronutrients as well, meaning that large numbers of people are malnourished.
It may even be worse. Many physicians and researchers consider the RDA an overly conservative and antiquated (obsolete) dietary standard. If that's the case, people malnourished by RDA standards are in very bad shape. If they were cars, they'd be driving on fumes.
The RDA was designed by the federal government as a guideline for "practically all healthy persons," but it's easy to question whether Americans can be considered healthy-and, therefore, adequate. For example, Paul Lachance, Ph.D., of Rutgers University, has pointed out that 30 percent of Americans smoke, and many drink too much alcohol. Others suffer from diabetes, high cholesterol levels, or hypertension. "After age 45, most people are not 'healthy' in the strict sense of the word and relatively few qualify as having no chronic or acute problem," LaChance explains.
In fact, the very concept of an RDA may be flawed. Forty years ago, Roger Williams, Ph.D., who discovered the B-vitamin pantothenic acid, developed the concept of "biochemical individuality." Williams contended that people need the same nutrients-but that they are highly individualistic in the amounts they need. For one person, 100 milligrams daily of vitamin C might be sufficient for health; for another, 3,000 milligrams.
Instead of minimum or recommended levels of nutrients, the late Nobel laureate Linus Pauling, Ph.D., emphasized the concept of optimal nutrition-that is, providing the body's cells with levels of vitamins and minerals that help them function at their best; kind of like using premium instead of regular fuel.
If you're guessing at what you're deficient in and then embark on a nutritional program, well, that's probably why you haven't got results with vitamins or supplements. To solve this problem, we use The Symptom Survey Analysis, It analyzes each individual on a case-by-case basis rather than going at the problem on a "shot gun" basis. Go here to read about the Symptom Survey Analysis. We also use the Hair Tissue Mineral Analysis. It reveals mineral ratios, which, in turn, affect how we utilize vitamins in the body.
For example, Pauling often recommended that people take anywhere from 100 to 300 times the RDA level of vitamin C for optimal health. The value of optimal intake was illustrated when Meir Stampfer, M.D., of Harvard University, reported that 400 IU of vitamin E-40 times the RDA-substantially reduced the risk of coronary heart disease. Determining your optimal intake requires an exact approach through the use of the Symptom Survey Analysis as everyone's nutritional needs are different.
You're off to a great start. A couple of studies have reported that organic produce contains higher levels of vitamins and minerals than do supermarket foods. However, Emanuel Cheraskin, M.D., D.M.D., professor emeritus of the University of Alabama has pointed out that we live in an unnaturally polluted and stressful world. He has suggested that supplements be considered "heroic countermeasures" to protect the body against this environment. If you eat organically or are a vegetarian, you probably need fewer supplements because you've got fewer bad dietary habits to compensate for. However, I will say that the sick vegetarian is probably the most difficult person to treat. This is largely due in fact that they got sick due to a lack of protein and their organ systems suffered as a result. There are those who may disagree but talk to the sick vegetarians and they will tell you how difficult it was for them to regain their health after such an episode.
First, you need to set some clear objectives that you want to achieve with a supplement program. You can tell us what you wish to achieve when you Take this preliminary to see if your condition could respond to treatment.
Second, once you take supplements, you need to assess that the supplements helped you achieve your health objectives. With Standard Process™ supplements, the results of a nutritional program can be quite dramatic. See what others have to say.
For example, if you're in your 20s, eat well, and are in good health, your objective might be "dietary insurance." You may not need much more than a multivitamin supplement and a little extra vitamin C. Only testing will tell.
On the other hand, if you're in your 30s and face a lot of stress at home or at work, "stress management" might be an objective. In this case, you might do well taking a high-potency B-complex supplement such as Cataplex® B. B-complex vitamins have long been considered the anti-stress supplement.
Reducing the risk of disease is a very clear objective. There is also strong evidence that a diet high in Cataplex® C and E and beta-carotene reduces the risk of both of these diseases.
Evan Shute, M.D., pioneered the treatment of heart disease with vitamin E in the 1930s. Most physicians thought it was worthless until Harvard University researchers confirmed its value in 1993. Now, vitamin E for the heart isn't all that controversial, and many cardiologists take it themselves. Other important heart nutrients include vitamin C, coenzyme Q10, magnesium, and calcium.
But be careful. If you purchase vitamin E as alpha tocopherol, you're not getting the whole vitamin E you need. Dr. Royal Lee used an analogy to illustrate this point. The same point applies to all of our products. He said you can give a chemist a watch and he can analyze it for content. Then hit it with a hammer and give it back to him. Although it has the same chemical makeup, it has now lost its function. A nutritional concentrate is an organized mechanism that has a function. If you break the function by separating the parts, the body can no longer use the mechanism.
THEN hit with hammer and give back to him. Although same chemical makeup, it now lost its A nutritional concentrate is an organized mechanism that has a function. If you break function by separating parts, body can no longer use the mechanism.
In the 1970s, Ewan Cameron, M.D., of Scotland treated terminal cancer patients with large doses of vitamin C. In general, they lived longer than did patients not given vitamin C. Over the past few years, Abram Hoffer, M.D., of Victoria, Canada, has treated terminal cancer patients with large doses of vitamin C and other vitamins and minerals. Many of these patients have lived much longer, and Hoffer considers many of them "cured" because they have not had a relapse in five years.
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