Completing the Nutritional Jigsaw
Your body creates millions of new cells every day. Your nutritional intake helps decide whether they will be healthy – or gradually accumulate damage.
Nutrients do not work in isolation. The combination of a wide range of nutrients from your food – including supplements – is a key determinant of your health.
Combining nutrients is key
Any reader of a popular newspaper can be forgiven for being confused about the value of dietary supplements.
- “Daily multivitamin cuts cancer risk” Daily Mail
- “Vitamin C lowers blood pressure” Science Daily
- “Vitamin B could slow devastating march of Alzheimer’s” Daily Telegraph
- “Vitamin pills: a false hope?” New York Times
- “Lack of vitamin D may have killed Mozart” Discovery News
There’s a reason for the confusion and often contradictory headlines.
You make literally millions of new cells every day. The creation of healthy cells, and the replacement of old cells with healthy cells, depends on a continuous supply of a range of nutrients.
These nutrients include more than the A-Z vitamins and minerals for which there are RDAs (Recommended Daily Amounts).
They include anti-inflammatory nutrients like Omega 3, Co Q10, curcumin and the flavonoids found in fruits and vegetables. They include anti-oxidant nutrients like vitamin C, vitamin E and the minerals selenium, magnesium and zinc. And they include carotenoids like beta carotene, lycopene and lutein and the isoflavones found in soy. All these, and more, are vital for long term health.
So research results on just a single nutrient such as vitamin C or vitamin D can only indicate part of a much bigger, more complex picture – even if the results are positive.
It is only a carefully formulated combination of supplements, allowing for the synergistic effect of nutrients on each other, that can hope to provide genuine long term health benefit.
Can you really get everything you need from a well-balanced diet?
Consider the case of Vitamin D.
People with sufficient levels of D in their bodies have a lower risk of almost all the degenerative diseases. So vitamin D is clearly essential.
But how much? The difference between deficient and insufficient is critical.
Data from the US National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey found that 9% of children across the USA were vitamin D deficient – they did not reach the minimum RDA levels to prevent possible disease. But a staggering 61% (50.8 million children!) were vitamin D insufficient – they did not reach the optimum level for long term health. There is no reason to suppose the situation is any better in Europe.
“We expected the prevalence of vitamin D insufficiency would be high, but the magnitude of the problem nationwide was shocking,” says lead researcher Juhi Kumar, a fellow in paediatrics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
In other words, you can meet the minimum daily allowance for a nutrient and prevent deficiency, but still have a nutritional status that is insufficient for long term health.
It is the daily intake of foods and dietary supplements to create all round sufficiency that must be the goal. NutriShield has been formulated to go beyond even sufficiency and supply an optimum daily intake of a wide range of protective nutrients.
For more information on individual nutrients, check out the Library from the top link.
For a full explanation of how a combination of dietary supplements can be part of an overall and comprehensive health programme, use this link to Chapter 22 of Dr
Clayton’s best-selling book, Health Defence.