I get asked a lot about supplements, which ones are the best, what do I take every day, and how to know which ones you need.
I was once a total supplement junkie – I had 40 bottles of different tablets and capsules on my bench top, and every morning I would take handfuls of vitamins, minerals, herbs and every new wonder nutrient that came out. It was expensive, and to be honest, I didn’t really notice much of a difference in my health.
That was before I had learnt fully about food as medicine – I had always had a very good diet, but I still thought I needed to take supplements to acheive outstanding health. Unfortunately, like so many others, I had bought into the marketing and the hype and not looked any deeper than that.
All that was quite a while ago, and now I rarely take supplements at all. I am much more happy using superfoods, green smoothies, and concentrated green nutrition like chlorella, rather than taking synthetic vitamins that have been created in a laboratory and have very little lifeforce at all.
And my health is better now, than when I was taking all those pills!
There is also the other myth around supplements, and that is that you can still live a lousy lifestyle, eat garbage, never exercise and use toxic personal care and cleaning products – but if you take a multi-vitamin, then you’ve made up for all the bad stuff!
Sorry! Not to be… You can’t live an unhealthy lifestyle and think that you are going to find health in a bottle – it just doesn’t happen.
As a naturopath, the way I use supplements with patients is as a medicine to relieve symptoms and correct problems quickly, whilst introducing changes to diet and lifestyle. They are for short term use only, and if the underlying causes aren’t corrected, then the supplements alone are not going to produce the desired result.
As Ann Wigmore has famously said “The sober truth is, there is no cure for anything besides the body’s inherent ability to heal itself”
And the simple tools for that are whole foods as found in nature, good quality water, exercise, sunlight, good rest and a positive outlook. Not a bucket load of the latest and greatest supplements!
Leisa
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