Vitamins an overview

With the winter quickly approaching, and access to fresh veggies is dwindling, many are left wondering how can I make sure my family gets enough vitamins. As American consumers we go to the grocery store and see shelves upon shelves of pharmaceutical vitamins. Some are multi some are single. Some have the whole complex of the vitamin, others are for anti-aging, men or women.

The true irony of vitamin supplements in the grocery store is so often missed or not even thought about by the average consumer. We have become accustomed to the "one-a-day" concept. We have failed to look around the grocery store for our nutrition, and tend to focus on the "one-a-day" for our nutrition. Further more, most of the items contained in the grocery store do nothing to enhance our body's vitamin storage and production, but rather necessitate something else being added after all the damage the food we bought does to our system. Gotta love the industrialization of our food.

Traditional cultures didn't have names for vitamins, they didn't know what vitamins were contained in what food and how many IU of vitamins were required everyday for optimal health. They didn't have food label, or Daily Values established for the foods they ate. They just ate the foods that energized and avoided the foods that caused lethargy or any array of other unpleasant side effects. Our problem. Our bodies operate at such a strung out mal-nourished state all the time we don't even know how to read our own bodies signals. We have been trained to think this tired, overwhelmed, stomach ache, constipation, headache, etc, etc. existence is normal. We have separated those and various other symptoms from our food and have deemed them symptoms that require a "supplement" to fix, whether it be a laxative or a vitamin...we are missing the point.

Vitamins occur in nature in their complete form in the presence of their naturally occurring counterparts, so the body can process and utilize them. When you give your body just a component of a vitamin, it is like giving a child a book, who can't read, and asking them to read it. Giving your child a book, is a good thing, but in the end it won't amount to much if you don't take the time to show them how to accomplish the task at hand...and vitamins are no different.

No pill can replace the value properly prepared foods. They wouldn't be able to manufacture a pill large enough to encompass such a task, nor would anyone want to swallow such a feat.

So what are you to do? Start by spending time researching your food supply. Many foods, vary greatly in vitamin content based on the soil they were grown in. For example, because of the excessive use of nitrogen fertilizers conventionally grown oranges contain 0% vitamin C. The USDA did nutrition profiles of crops from the 50's-70's. Additional research and label updates have not been done since then. It is your job to know what happens to your food before it hits your plate.

Get a basic overview about vitamins, where they are found, and what ones are worth the money!

Try to eliminate the synthetic forms of vitamins from your diet as much as possible.

Increase your grocery budget and decrease your supplement budget...