Why I'm Not Big Into Supplements and What Matters a Whole Lot More!
Ok, so here's the details! I'd love to tell you a quick story of how I became A Nutritionist Who's Not Big Into Supplements- quite an unusual and perhaps risqué position to take! Everyone knows that every health expert takes a zillion supplements!
When I first started on my health journey to try and feel fabulous and totally available to my life -instead of feeling like my health was constantly holding me back from doing all the rad things I wanted to do- one of the first things I did was drop a couple hundreds of dollars at Whole Foods, trying to find the best supplement to help me feel better.
Help with my mood, help with my digestion, help with my weight, help with my sleep, help with my sanity LOL....you get the picture.
As you may have guessed, I may as well have just tossed those hundreds of dollars directly into the toilet because all my fancy and expensive supplements made no difference in how I felt. At all.
This is almost always the story for people!I went LIVE in my free facebook group Hormonal Weightloss for Women teaching all about why- and here's the notes:
#1- Supplements don’t work in the wrong food environment. They *can*enhance something that already is working well, but they can't fix what's inherently not working!
Ex: adding fresh basil to an already gross salad isn’t going to do anything. It will only be helpful to enhance an already tasty salad.
#2- You need to know what you’re doing and how to take them for them to be effective.
Ex: Certain vitamins (like b12) get destroyed in stomach acid, and so as a capsule they’re useless- they’re needed as a sublingual.Many vitamins also compete for absorption (like Vit C and Vit b12) and so if you take them together they’ll cancel each other out.If you’re taking *Synthetic* forms of Vitamins...at best- your body almost always isn’t able to make use of it and, even worse, at times it can clog up your system and act like a toxin if you’re not able to get it out of your system. An example of this is like folic acid- which is synthetic vs folate, the form your body can actually use.
#3- I don’t see the Pill Paradigm as the most useful paradigm for healing and health. The wrong question begets the wrong answer.
If we’re not well, the most useful question is *Not* “what pill am I missing?”
It’s FAR more useful to ask ourselves, “what might I be eating (or not eating) EVERY DAY that is contributing to making me feel this way?”
****** additionally, many people who sell supplements have it as a primary part of their business model which *could* have a conflict of interest- is it best for you or for them to have you taking 723 supplements a day?
Plus- if they’ve been trained *by the supplement company* the information is going to be biased towards what is most profitable for that individual company rather than most effective for the consumers. That’s why many of the MLM brands are primarily synthetic vitamins vs food-based.
