Supplements, was Weight loss and Vitamix

[Guest guest]

There are a couple of reasons I know of for using supplemental products.

If you are not certain of your foodstuffs and their growers, it is

likely that they were commercially grown. Land used for decades (and

longer) becomes depleted of nutrient content and therefore has no

nutrient to convey to plant material. Generally, so long as the plant

grows well enough to sell a product, this fact is ignored--only if the

plant dies or produces poorly or slowly is money wasted on fertilizers

and other soil amendments are almost never considered in a commercial

situation. Much of our commercially-available food supply is produced

on just such land, therefor is apt to be deficient in many if not all

the good things we think we're getting. The defense on this one is to

either grow your own, organically, so that the soil is cared for/fed,

yielding a healthy soil with nutrient material to make available for

transfer to plant material, or to know well your grower and his/her

practices and reliability.

The " organic " foods " certified " by the USDA are not even close to what

we've actually known to be organic over the past 50 years or so....if

you are curious about what they consider to be organic and to be organic

practices and growing conditions, go to their website and you will see a

giant disconnect there....the point, rather, seems to have been to

provide a way for agribusiness to cut into the existing (actual) organic

market. If you must purchase foods when you don't know the grower, find

a certification agent that you can trust (takes a fair amount of

research, I know) and then stick with it. The main reason I moved 25

years ago to where I am now was for the active organic farming and

gardening activity, with an excellent certification program, and I've

never regretted that.

Other than sick soil, problems that prevent our foodstuffs from being as

nutritious as we'd like to think are pesticides and herbicides, some of

which interfere with the processes by which materials are transferred to

plants, air pollution with some of the same problems, contaminated water

supplies (a growing problem), and the practice of breeding for and

harvesting unripe plant material so that it can withstand the trip to

market while it " ripens " .

As to tablets/capsules not dissolving.....that's another big mixed-up

mess, with some things not even designed to dissolve in the stomach but

in the lower parts of the tract, each of which has it's own digestive

" aids " , and any (or all) of which may well be out of kilter due to any

number of digestive/nutrient causes...or other unrelated causes such as

physical (even a hernia can play havoc depending on the location and

degree of/frequency of incarceration) or environmental. So it's all tricky.

So there are a few of the issues very sketchily outlined. And having

said all that, I reared 3 kiddos and have always maintained myself

without supplements of any kind, including through pregnancies, etc.

But I've been blessed to be able to raise my own food on my own terms.

If I'd not, am not sure what the path should have been....just glad we

didn't have to go there. Each of us has to work it out ourselves.

SJ, in snowy Maine