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2 years ago, I decided I was fed up with supplements. Just freakin' tired of all the tablets, capsules, pills, powders and oils. And bottles. Lots and lots of plastic bottles scattered everywhere. I distinctly remember the day I finally decided something needed to change. It was when I swung open the door of my refrigerator to dive into my daily regimen of vitamins, antioxidants, nutrients, micronutrients, fish oils... ...and I realized it was getting overwhelming.Sure, it was better living through science, but it was anything but simple. I'm sure you've experienced the same thing. You open what seems like nearly a dozen different bottles to launch into your morning supplement regimen.... ...or you pack your suitcase to travel and struggle to prioritize which bottles to shove into your limited suitcase space... ...or you spend an inordinate amount of your precious time tracking, ordering and restocking your vitamin D or your fish oil, or your greens, or your multi-vitamin or your minerals or your antioxidants or your amino acids... You get the idea. Supplement clutter, supplement confusion and utter lack of supplement simplicity. ------------------------------------ 9 Reasons You May Not Want To Throw Out All Your Supplements Now don't get me wrong. I don't think supplements are an inconvenient and unnecessary curse that should simply all be tossed out. There is certainly evidence that consuming nutrients from a healthy diet can be more beneficial than relying strictly upon supplements, but even if you're eating a “healthy” diet, studies have shown that it is nearly impossible in our modern era to get all our nutrients, vitamins and minerals only from food. For example, a recent paper by scientists from the Council for Responsible Nutrition in Washington reports: "Large portions of the population had total usual intakes below the estimated average requirement for vitamins A (35%), C (31%), D (74%), and E (67%) as well as calcium (39%) and magnesium (46%). Only 0%, 8%, and 33% of the population had total usual intakes of potassium, choline, and vitamin K above the adequate intake when food and multivitamin use was considered. The percentage of the population with total intakes greater than the tolerable upper intake level (UL) was very low for all nutrients..." "...Conclusions: In large proportions of the population, micronutrient sufficiency is currently not being achieved through food solutions for several essential vitamins and minerals. Use of age- and gender-specific multivitamin supplements may serve as a practical means to increase the micronutrient status in subpopulations of Americans while not increasing intakes above the upper intake level." So how on earth could this be? Is the planet broken or something? There's actually nine reasons for the failure of modern diets to supply our bodies with all the nutrients we need. First, modern commercial farming practices strip our precious soil of nutrients. When plants are repeatedly grown on the same land for year-after-year (a relatively new phenomenon in agriculture that beats up our land but gives us lots and lots of calories), the overused soil loses it's nutrients faster than they can be replaced. Over time, the plants have fewer nutrients to grow, so the farmers are forced to fertilize. Fertilizer does indeed contain enough nutrition for a plant to survive until harvesting, but not enough nutrients to support your body's nutrient needs. As discussed in the excellent book "Not On The Label: What Really Goes Into The Food On Your Plate", this results in plants that up to 75% fewer micronutrients. This problem is compounded by the fact that most plants are not harvested fresh, and the nutrients degrade as they often sit on airplanes, trucks, shelves, and counters for weeks before they arrive on your plate. Second, most modern fruits and vegetables are grown for maximum sugar calories, and not maximum nutrients, and because of this much of your fresh produce that us humans would have historically relied upon for nutrients are instead artificially high in calories, fructose and other sugars while being low in nutrients. And of course, this is all passed on to the animals (including you!) that are eating the plants. For example, one study in the Journal of Nutrition and Health found copper levels have dropped by 90% in dairy, 55% in meat, and 76% in vegetables! Third, pesticides are making this problem even worse. Because polyphenols are produced as a defense against bugs and pathogens, plants exposed to pesticides will be lower in precious polyphenols compared to organic ones. To make matters even more frustrating, even if you buy organic plants, this is no guarantee that they haven't been exposed to pesticides! So unless you're going out of your way to grow your own fresh fruits and vegetables in a pristine backyard garden which contains soil that you've treated with added minerals, you are at a huge risk for malnourishment and nutrient deficiency that adversely affects your performance, fat loss, recovery, digestion, brain, sleep, and hormone balance. Fourth, it's not just nutrient-poor plants that are affecting the nutrient status of the actual animals we rely upon for food, but it's also what many of those animals are being fed - especially grains. Compared to grass-fed meat, grain-fed meat is lower in antioxidants, micronutrients, fatty acids, minerals, and vitamins, but unfortunately, eating high-quality, organic grass-fed (and grass-finished) meat, pastured pork and naturally raised poultry is simply not a reality for many people living in urban environments or frequently traveling. Fifth, the nutrients in your food aren't the only things that are disappearing - your liquids are being affected too. Unless you're drinking from your own well, or relying upon fancy mineralized water such as Pellegrino, Perrier and Gerolsteiner, your bottled water, filter water and tap water is also often stripped of precious minerals - and if does indeed contain adequate minerals, these are typically accompanied by enormous levels of flouride and chlorine. So this means that unless you want to spend lots and lots of money on fancy water, you are stuck in a situation where you must filter your water to get rid of the dangerous stuff, then figure out other methods, such as supplementation, to get the minerals you'd normally be getting from the water. Unfortunately, milk is not much better than water. The majority of nutrients in milk are found in the fat, so while organic raw, unpasteurized, full-fat dairy is high in nutrients, most of us simply don't have ready access to it, especially at the typical grocery store. In addition, pasteurization can destroy many of the nutrients in both skim and full fat milk. Modern, conventional milk and other dairy products from grain-fed cattle can also be higher in aflatoxin and other mycotoxins, which increases your nutrient needs even more, creating a vicious cycle. So whether it's due to nutrient-poor plants, nutrient-poor animals, nutrient-poor milk, or nutrient-poor water, most diets are now so micronutrient deficient that they require on average 27,575 calories to supply all the essential nutrients that you need. In other words, in our modern era, you would need to be stuffing your face all day long to actually get what your body needs, and this does not into account the fact that if you are trying to lose weight by restricting calories or if you are a physically active person like a triathlete, marathoner, Crossfitter, weightlifter, or other exercise enthusiast, then your risk of nutrient deficiency is going to be even higher! In other words, if you are A) trying to lose weight by not stuffing your body full of excessive calories or B) an athlete or physically active person, then you're pretty much guaranteed to be at a constantly malnourished nutrient deficit (unless you figure out a way to somehow squeeze in all those added nutrients). The older you get, the fewer nutrients you absorb, so as you age, the worse things become. And that's reasons six (weight loss), seven (exercise) and eight (age) that you may need a little help over and above what you'd get from food. So let's say you dig a well, grow your own produce, milk your own goats, eat strictly grass-fed meat and wild-caught fish, you're relatively young and you avoid excessive physical activity or calorie restriction for weight loss. Then you're safe, right? No added nutrients necessary, right? The unfortunate ninth fact is that unless you live on a pristine mountaintop in the Himalayas, you're exposed every day to airborne pollutants, xenoestrogens from plastics and BPA, environmental toxins, mold, industrial solvents, electromagnetic fields, heavy metals, fluorescent lighting, constant stress, sleep disruption and a host of other modern-day assailants upon your biology. Your body simply wasn't mean to deal with these physiological stressors - all of which vastly increase your need for nutrients to help you fight the daily battle. So for the nine reasons above - depleted soil, nutrient-poor produce, pesticides, conventional meat, subpar water and milk, weight loss, physical activity, age, and our modern post-industrial living environment, you definitely shouldn't throw out all your supplements. --------------------------------------- Is It Possible For Supplements To Be Simpler? So this was the conundrum I found myself in two years ago as I stood in front of my refrigerator door and sighed in frustration at the dizzying array of supplements and bottles. I knew that because of my extremely active lifestyle and the other reasons I just listed that I couldn't and shouldn't just throw out all my supplements. I knew that I needed to keep my precious nutrients topped off for better performance, faster recovery, optimized fat burning, clean digestion, superior mental focus, better sleep and hormone balance... ...but I also knew that I was sick and tired of having to lug around a bunch of bottles, painstakingly use a weekly pill box to keep track of my supplements like an old man tracks his medication, and constantly be headed over to Amazon or some other website to re-order something I was running low in. And then there was that gnawing worry at the back of my mind that any of these supplements I was ingesting could be laced with something like chemicals, toxins, metals or illegal-performance enhancing drugs that could potentially damage my body, put pie in my face and get me banned from competing in a sanctioned sport like triathlon. I wanted better living through science. But I also desperately needed more simplicity. And I knew that somewhere, somehow, there must be a way to have both: the ultimate combination of science and simplicity. --------------------------------------- Seven Criteria a Multivitamin Must Have At that point, I embarked upon my quest to discover the greatest multivitamin on the face of the planet - something that could cover all my bases from a nutrient standpoint without requiring a dizzying, inconvenient and exhausting array of pills, bottles and packets. After all, that's kind of the definition of a multivitamin, right? It supposed to cover multiple needs. As a nutritionist, personal trainer, exercise physiologist and strength and conditioning coach with strict standards about what I find acceptable for myself or my clients to ingest, I also had a very distinct set of criteria that I knew a multivitamin must have - seven criteria to be precise... --------------------------------------- My Multivitamin Criteria #1: Capsules, Not Tablets Before completely shoving tablets under the bus, I'll acknowledge the two benefits tablets possess. First, because tablets are pressed together so hard, more nutrients can fill the same amount of space than you can put into a capsule. Second, it’s cheaper to make tablets than capsules. There are several drawbacks, however, to using tablets. First, tablets are much harder to digest. Because tablets are packed together so tightly and need far more binders and diluents to keep them together, it takes much longer for them to break down in the digestive system. A capsule, on the other hand, breaks down within just minutes of hitting your digestive tract. This is important because of the little known fact that most of the nutrients in a multivitamin actually need to be absorbed in your stomach. When a tablet takes too long to break down in the stomach, and passes on to your intestinal tract, its content will be far less broken down and absorbed. And that means expensive pee. Tablets also need lots of extra nasty ingredients, such as binders, lubricants, coatings, disintegrants, and other excipients. These ingredients must be added to make the tablet stay together, to make the tablet shiny, and to make the tablet break apart. Tablet press machines compact the powdered nutrients together (that have already been mixed with binders and lubricants) with a tremendous amount of force. Then, to make the tablets shiny and easier to swallow, the tablets are often sprayed with coatings such as shellac (just like the shellac found on furniture but instead labeled “pharmaceutical glaze”) or coated with “vegetable protein,” (most often a protein derived from GMO corn). Yuk. I'll take a capsule, please. --------------------------------------- My Multivitamin Criteria #2: One Morning Dose & One Evening Dose Your body needs nutrients throughout the course of the day, not just one huge shotgun dose when you get out of bed in the morning or before you go to bed at night. So I needed to find a multivitamin designed in such a way that it delivered important nutrients for daily metabolism and activity in the morning dose, and important nutrients for recovery, rest, and sleep in the evening dose, but without a dizzying array of capsules. I'll admit that it does take slightly more discipline to take a multivitamin twice a day – once in the morning and once in the evening – but it’s a much better way to deliver the optimal nutrients at the optimal times throughout the day. After all, you'd rarely eat only breakfast or only dinner, right? I figure if I can handle at least two meals, I can handle two supplement doses - as long it's not a dozen different bottles of stuff. --------------------------------------- My Multivitamin Criteria #3: Low Number of Capsules One extremely inconvenient factor in most multivitamin formulas out there is the number of capsules necessary for daily use if you truly are going to be able to get all the nutrients that you need from a single formula. I think that taking three capsules in the morning and three capsules in the evening is practical and doable for me. Anything less than the six capsules per day can significantly reduce the efficacy of a multivitamin formula, but once you get over six capsules, it becomes a pain to manage, difficult to swallow, and a hassle to travel with. --------------------------------------- My Multivitamin Criteria #4: Vegan & Vegetarian Friendly Capsules Most capsule-based multivitamins use capsules made from bovine gelatin - that's cow. And although I do not personally eat a plant-based diet, I have many clients who are either vegan or vegetarian. So I wanted the actual capsule material to be made from the best alternative to cattle-based bovine gelatin. The ideal answer would be a capsule made of cellulose, which is a natural, vegetable-based material, and is pure plant fiber (usually from pine trees). In other words, I know it's important to many of my clients and friends that no animals be harmed in the formulation of a good multivitamin. --------------------------------------- My Multivitamin Criteria #5: No Magnesium Stearate or Other Nasty…
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