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Title: Devotees of Liquid Nutrition Hail The End Of The Horse Pill
Word Count: 816
Author: Steve Smith
Email: stephensmith45@aol.com
Category: Health & Fitness
Article URL:
http://www.submityourarticle.com/articles/easypublish.php?art_id#15996
The article is preformatted to 60CPL.
Devotees of Liquid Nutrition Hail The End Of The Horse Pill
It’s perhaps one of the sadder ironies of our time that the
astonishing affluence we enjoy in inessential luxuries
should be accompanied by increasing poverty in the most
basic necessity of all =96 the very food we eat.
The one thing in which our modern Western diet is not
deficient, of course, is calories, as a glance at our
surging rates of obesity and diabetes will quickly confirm.
But these calories are largely provided in the form of
refined carbohydrates, sugar and fat, leaving little time
or space for the consumption of health promoting fresh
fruits and vegetables.
Worse still, there’s overwhelming evidence that even our
fruits and vegetables are not as nutritionally potent as
they used to be. As early as 1936 Senate Document 264
(74th US Congress, Second Session ) noted that 99% of
Americans were deficient in necessary minerals and in the
light of the continued intensification of farming methods
it seems highly unlikely that the situation will have
improved in the intervening years. Indeed, the 1992 Earth
Summit reported that mineral concentrations in US farm
soils were 85% lower than those of a hundred years ago.
The figures for other wealthy Western nations are almost as
alarming, and the problem doesn’t just lie in the soil.
The modern prevalence of highly refined grains, and the
treatment of fruits and vegetables with preservatives,
dyes, pesticides and even radiation is a proven disaster
for vitamin and mineral retention in our food, as well as a
significant toxic assault with which the human organism
simply wasn’t designed to cope.
So not surprisingly in the face of this depressing picture,
diet supplements have become a multi-billion dollar
industry in spite of conventional medicine’s insistence
that a well balanced diet including all the main food
groups should supply all our nutritional needs.
In a way this traditional view has some sense in it,
because there’s a fundamental problem in trying to rectify
a very poor diet through supplementation alone. The
problem is that the human body is a wonderfully complex
organism which functions holistically. That’s to say that
each and every one of its almost infinite number of
biochemical processes is dependent upon numerous others for
its proper functioning, and no vital nutrient can do its
work in the absence of an adequate supply of the others .
So it’s rarely any use to take specific supplements in
isolation except in the very short term. And since research
has shown that healthy animals, including humans, require
at least 45 different minerals as well as essential
vitamins, amino acids and fatty acids, trying to take all
these as individual supplements would be a time consuming
and tiresome process.
As a not very palatable alternative there are of course the
torpedo size multis or “horse pills”. The problem is that
is that these must be heavily compressed and treated with a
binding agent and the tablets produced by this process are
inevitably bulky and difficult to swallow. Laboratory
technicians try to help to some extent by wrapping the
vitamins and minerals in protein to assist with their
metabolism; but according to the 1996 Physician’s Desk
Reference only 10 – 20% is absorbed even if your digestive
system is extremely efficient.
And for those with even slightly sub-optimal health, this
bleak outlook is even worse, because digestion is one of
the most sensitive and easily upset of all our vital
functions. We all know that when we have any kind of
emotional upset or illness, even as minor as a cold, the
first thing to go is our appetite. The fact is that the
complex and subtle biochemistry required for digestion has
been thrown off balance, and your body just doesn’t want to
take in food it knows it won’t be able to absorb. So it’s
a cruel paradox that it’s just when you’re most in need of
supplements that you’re least likely to be able to benefits
from them.
But this doesn’t mean you should give up on the idea of
supplements. Advocates of liquid vitamin and mineral
supplements now claim absorption rates as high as 95-98%
from fresh ingredients which in the scientific jargon are
much more bio-available. That’s to say they’re much more
quickly and easily assimilated into the blood stream and
thereby conveyed to the tissues that so urgently need them.
Since the plant-derived ingredients are not powdered or
compressed and require no added fillers or binding agents;
devotees claim as little as a single fluid ounce may
contain all of the body’s daily nutritional requirements.
And as many of the minerals we require are needed in trace
amounts of 100 milligrams or less, there may be some truth
in this.
So although no one suggests that a liquid supplement can
take the place of a healthy diet, it may perhaps be worth
considering as a convenient and extremely cost effective
form of health insurance.
About the Author:
Steve Smith is a freelance copywriter specialising in
direct marketing and with a particular interest in health
products. Find out more about liquid vitamins at
http://www.sisyphuspublicationsonline.com/LiquidNutrition/In
formation.htm