Fooducation

I subscribe to several excellent nutrition and health blogs, including blog.fooducate.com. I would recommend checking it out, and I really thought the latest entry was important. Entitled “Why in the world are you taking a multivitamin?,” it challenges the common assumption that supplements are (what my Yiddish grandma would’ve called) any big metziya (i.e., bargain).

Many of us don’t take the time to prepare and eat enough whole foods, and we kid ourselves into thinking that if we just swallow enough pills, we’ll cover all our nutritional bases. But as Fooducate points out: “Eating nutrient poor fast food and snacks each day – and supplementing – will NOT make you healthier.”

It continues: “Multivitamins usually have 10-20 nutrients. But there are thousands of nutrients in each fruit or vegetable we eat that science has yet to fully understand. Not to mention how they all work together. Isolating a few of the nutrients while disregarding the others may be the reason that many of the promises on the supplement packaging never come true.”

This is an important reminder that there is no shortcut to health and wellness.  Trying to cut corners (think fast food) is what got our country into its current nutritional mess in the first place.