Supplements are great… there are so many reasons to pack in extra vitamins and nutrients! Maybe you are active, or just want to maintain health and wellness, maybe you are recovering or improving your health from a non-optimum condition.
Whatever the reason, you know that taking daily vitamins is good for you.
But not all supplements and vitamins are created equal.
Many of the vitamins available contain just a part of the vital nutrition of the food from which it was derived.
Let’s take a quick, closer look at the difference between getting the whole plant in a supplement, versus just an “active ingredient” or two.
Food Isn’t All That
This first part has a lot to do with why you probably take supplements in the first place: food isn’t what it used to be.
From processing and frying, down to the very soil in which it is grown, the food in the United States (and quite possibly the world) has gone downhill in quality in the past several decades.
A big part of that is the growing and harvesting process itself. Ever tasted a homegrown tomato? Homegrown spinach? Apples straight off the tree? When allowed to ripen, food tastes better (and packs greater nutritional punch).
What’s more, food grown in America decades ago contained greater nutrition than it does now–even if you skip the processed foods, eating healthy isn’t as healthy as it once was!
Some of the main reasons for decreased nutritional content of food include:
Mass production to meet demand, which utilizes more machine growth and picking
Regrowing in the same soil, which depletes nutrients
Single crop growth, which also depletes soil nutrition
The use of pesticides and herbicides, which kill off unwanted pests but can also impact the healthy biome of soil and food
Off-season usage requiring off-season growth or shipment from other climates
Transportation requiring picking earlier, so food ripens in shipment instead of in the soil/on the vine/etc.
All of these “advances” in the food industry have helped solve problems of meeting demand and making money, but often at the expense of nutrition.
Micronutrition Is A Thing
“Farm-to-table” restaurants, farmers markets, organic growers and other direct-food-sourcing solutions are doing their best to help improve the quality of produce available to consumers. You can shop these resources to help improve demand for food quality.
But when it comes to the supplement market, one still has to be savvy about sourcing.
Another primary reason for this has to do with micronutrition.
Take, for example, vitamin C–a well-known vitamin crucial for healthy immune function, bone health, and other key body functions. Before the connection was known, scurvy (a disease caused by a deficiency in vitamin C) affected people around the world. Sailors became known as “limeys” when they started to treat scurvy with a simple solution–citrus fruit as part of their regular diet.
Vitamin C has an “active” part, ascorbic acid, but “ascorbic acid is a reduced form of vitamin C synthesized from hexose sugar” (Science Direct). Synthesized ascorbic acid is missing components of a complete food-source, such as a lime.
The same is true for countless herbs and vitamins: it is better to get them in a whole food form, than an extracted, synthesized mega dose that may do more harm than good.
Get With The Plan(t)
At BOOSTme we recognize the benefits of active adaptogens: eleutherosides, diphenyltetrazolium bromide and other words you have to speak Latin (a dead language) to pronounce.
But rather than extract such beneficial “active ingredients” from herbs like Siberian Ginseng and Maral Root, we want everyone to experience the full benefits of our Primary Adaptogen formula.
So give your body a whole food BOOST, without the crash, with BOOSTme.
