Your vitamins: Are they really beneficial or just a placebo effect
11/25/2015 / By mindbodyscience
The two main reasons why people do not get health and stay healthy are (1) internal toxicity and (2) nutritional deficiency. Many people (especially in our fast-paced Western culture) know they should be getting the nutrients that they need, but they don’t want to change their eating habits or lifestyle so they buy vitamin supplements as the quick solution. But do the kinds of vitamins they are consuming really offer a solution to their body’s nutritional deficiency or could it potentially add to their body’s toxicity problem?
This article is not advancing the idea (promoted by power-hungry groups like the United Nations or Big Pharma) that all vitamin supplements are dangerous to our health and therefore should be banned. However, you should ask yourself: If you consume vitamin supplements, do you know if these vitamins actually benefit your body or do you just believe they do?
Synthetic vitamins and the placebo effect
A placebo effect occurs when a fake treatment or inactive substance like a sugar pill sometimes improves a patient’s condition simply because the person believes that it will. Similar to a placebo effect is a self-fulfilling prophecy which occurs when a person inadvertently causes a prediction to come true, simply because that person expects it to come true.
Now there are two kinds of vitamins: fake/synthetic; and natural/whole-food, plant-derived. Most of the vitamins people consume in our nation are the synthetic kind, because they are the least expensive and people want to save money. However, in this case, a cheaper price means the vitamins are of cheaper quality, made with inexpensive and potentially harmful ingredients (GMOs, other fillers etc), which in the long run could be more costly.
According to research done by the Organic Consumer Association, “The human body can’t regulate the absorption of synthetic vitamins, neither can it optimize their levels.” They also said that when synthetic vitamins are consumed, “the highly bioactive, chemically processed vitamin molecules bypass the body’s natural enzymatic pathways, giving the body the signal that its vitamin pool is fully loaded. After synthetic vitamin administration, the body is tricked to believe that it doesn’t need to utilize more of the same nutrients from food. … In reality, synthetic vitamins are received by the body as drugs and like all drugs, they can potentially disrupt normal metabolic functions often with devastating side effects.”
By consuming synthetic vitamins, your body is tricked into thinking it has been provided the nutrients it needs. In addition to this, since many people may associate “health” with these synthetic “vitamins,” there’s the self-fulfilling prophecy as people consume these “vitamins,” tricked into believing that they’re really beneficial when they could just be giving them expensive urine or worse.
Where possible, drink your vitamins
Other than vitamins like B12, consuming the raw (unpasteurized) juices of organic whole vegetables is the fastest way for your body to absorb and assimilate essential vitamins and nutrients because juicing bypasses much of the digestive process, allowing the body’s cells to be nourished more quickly. Though it’s still beneficial to eat raw vegetables and fruit, as the pulp/fiber promotes good colon health, widely available research and personal testimonies verify that juicing helps people get healthy and remain healthy, and speeds recovery from surgery and illness. Most store-bought juice isn’t truly raw but has been heated/pasteurized, so you’ll want fresh juice and you’ll need a quality juicer for that. The slow/masticating juicers yield more juice, preserve more enzymes and produce less heat than the faster centrifugal versions. If you must buy vitamin supplements, determine which form (liquid, powder, pill) is best for your body’s needs as they each form has its strengths and weaknesses. Also be sure that they are raw and sourced from an organic whole food, and avoid fillers (other ingredients in addition to the vitamin itself).
Sources:
http://www.healthy-juicing.com
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