Excerpt from "Allergies: The Natural Approach," The Standard, Vol. 1, No. 2., Edited by Thomas G. Guilliams, Ph.D.

Finally someone is saying what many of us have known for sometime: that most people are unlikely to get enough vitamins from food and should take either supplements or eat specially fortified foods. This statement was just released by the U.S. Institute of Medicine on April 7, 1998. According to Dr. Robert Russell at the Tufts University, "This is the first time a recommendation has been made for intake other than from natural foods for a significant portion of the population." The first by them, but certainly not the first.

Supplementation is simply the adding of components not found in the available material, in this case, diet. The majority of the world's plants are not native to Central Wisconsin where I live. My wife and I choose to supplement our diet with Florida oranges, Georgia peaches, California grapes, and a host of ingredients from around the world to gain the vitamins, minerals, and phytonutrients we want to complete our diet. Unfortunately, many of the most biologically active phytonutrients are very unstable in the original plant material (must be eaten fresh), are too bulky to be transported efficiently (need to be concentrated), or are found in a part of the plant that most people would choose not to ingest (root, skin, bark, etc.). Supplementation is taking these ingredients to a population that cannot legitimately add them to their normal diet.

This is certainly not an endorsement for taking supplements instead of fresh fruits and vegetables, but with them. The best advice (I don’t recall from whom) I have heard concerning the diet is "Eat things that would spoil, but eat them before they do!" Our modern culture has spent billions of dollars extracting the active components out of foods to increase shelf life, improve texture, and improve shelf appeal. This, and the fact that much of the soil has been depleted of vital trace minerals in the past 100 years, has led to the need for supplementation of vitamins and minerals, as well as various phytonutrients. From the looks of it, what we have known for decades has become a novel finding by our federal government.

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