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What You Need to Know
Our modern American diet is pretty devoid of nutrition. Nutrients are things like vitamins, minerals, and essential fatty acids (“fish oil”). We need the right amounts to be optimally healthy and avoid disease, both acute and chronic. Nutrients should be bioavailable (easy for the body to use), so that means 1) avoiding synthetic supplements (most of them on the market), 2) eating nutrient-dense foods, and 3) and using whole food-based supplements. Nutrient-dense foods are things like liver, whole eggs, and lots of vegetables. My favorite supplements are from doTERRA and Designs for Health.
What Are Nutrients?
Before we get into how to get more nutrients into your diet, we need to understand exactly what a nutrient is. A nutrient could be called the vital building blocks for your body. We need nutrients or else we would die. These seemingly mysterious compounds are things like vitamins, minerals, and essential fatty acids. Everyone has probably heard of at least vitamins like A, B, C, D, E, and K.
Where are nutrients found? You can find them in your food and in supplements. While it’s easy to pop a pill and feel like you got your nutrition for the day, much of the time it isn’t doing much good. Many of the vitamin supplements on the shelves are synthetic, meaning they aren’t from natural sources like food. They are engineered in a lab to mimic real nutrients, but in fact the body has a hard time processing and using them. We refer to this mechanism of processing and usage as “bioavailability.”
Bio-what? Please explain
If a nutrient is bioavailable, that means the body can easily, without much effort, use that nutrient. So going back to the synthetic supplements: those lab-engineered nutrients are not very bioavailable. A good example is folic acid. We’ve all heard about how pregnant women or women who could get pregnant need to be taking folic acid. Unfortunately, this form of B vitamin (Vitamin B9 to be exact) is FAKE. Yup, we are telling pregnant women to take the fake form of a vitamin. Doesn’t seem very intuitive, does it?
What we should be telling women of child-bearing age to take is folate, which is the natural form of folic acid. When a person takes the latter, the body has to go through all this rigamarole to convert that folic acid into folate. And if you have this thing called the MTHFR mutation (which I have), it is even harder for your body to make that conversion. [1]
Basically the takeaway is that REAL vitamins – meaning, the form found in food – is what we need to be consuming. Otherwise we are literally flushing money down the toilet. (Because water-soluble vitamins that haven’t been absorbed, like folic acid, come out in your pee.)
So how do I get my nutrients? From supplements or just food?
Great question! Ideally, we would get all our nutrients from food. This is because nutrients work together in certain ways that is hard to recreate even in whole food-based supplements. If a nutrient is isolated, then it probably won’t work very well. [2] A good example of this is calcium and Vitamin D. We must have these two nutrients together. Vitamin D helps calcium absorb properly. Unfortunately, many Americans are low in Vitamin D, which means they aren’t absorbing calcium very well. (Notice all the problems with osteoporosis, which causes brittle and less dense bones!) Nothing happens in a vacuum.
However, our soil is depleted and that’s a huge problem. In order to produce nutrient-rich food (whether plants or animals), we need to have nutrient-rich soil. In America, we are all about production, production, production. More is better. Bigger is better! We deplete the soil’s nutrients by the use of pesticides and not rotating crops. [2] If the soil isn’t healthy, our food won’t be healthy, and we won’t be healthy because we won’t be getting the nutrients we need.
So alas, in our modern world supplements are usually necessary because of our depleted soil, and also because none of us are perfect. But we can reduce our need for a lot of supplements by eating foods with the most nutrients. This is called “nutrient density.”
Which foods are most nutrient-dense?
This month I’ve been reading Deep Nutrition: Why Your Genes Need Traditional Food by Catherine Shanahan, M.D. It sure is eye-opening and motivating to eat better, more nutrient-dense foods! I could get on a tangent about how we are being told by the government and other authorities to eat foods that actually aren’t that great for us, but I’ll refrain from that in this post. But basically, here are some foods that contain a ton of nutrients and that we should be eating on a regular basis. (My two references are Deep Nutrition and also Paleo Principles.)
- Organ meats, like liver
- Homemade bone broth
- Lots and lots of vegetables
- Meat from grass-fed, free range, and/or wild sources
- Wild-caught, sustainably harvested fish
- Whole eggs from free range chickens
If you’re like me, you’re looking at the top of that list and thinking, Ugh LIVER? Seriously?? That. Is. Disgusting. Personally, I can’t stomach liver either. So, I decided to make liver pills. (If this grosses you out too, there’s yet another option.) I buy beef liver from a local, trusted, organic butcher. I chop it into tiny pieces, freeze, and swallow just like any other pill. There is no taste and it is really simple (once you go through the work of actually creating the pills). You can read about how to do it on this blog. The #1 thing is to make sure you’re getting your liver from a reputable source and you freeze for 14 days before consuming. [3]
What kind of supplements should I be taking?
As a nurse, I can’t “prescribe” what you as an individual should be taking. Talk with your doctor or nutritionist before running out and buying a bunch of supplements. But I will share what I do. Let’s go back to the liver thing. If making liver pills disgusts you, there’s an alternative for a whole food supplement: desiccated liver pills from Vital Proteins. These are an absolute powerhouse of nutrients and probably the cleanest supplements out there. Check out the bottle label: liver is packed with Vitamin A (70% of RDA) and Vitamin B12 (230% of RDA). Many Americans don’t get enough of either of these vitamins.
When choosing a supplement, make sure it is whole food-based. The brands that I trust include doTERRA and Designs for Health. There are many others that are reputable, but those are the ones that I have personally used on a regular basis. Taking a high-quality multivitamin and essential fatty acid complex are a good starting point. A physician or nutritionist could give you more detailed direction on other targeted supplements to take. For example, I supplement with extra magnesium and also phosphatidylcholine per instructions from my functional medicine M.D. back in North Carolina.
Takeaway points
We covered a lot in this post! Take time to digest it (pun intended!) and reach out with any questions you might have. Just as a recap, we concluded that:
- Nutrients are found in food and supplements and they are vital for sustaining human life
- Nutrients need to be bioavailable for our body to use them properly and efficiently
- Many, if not most, supplements on the market today are synthetic or not formulated properly, downgrading their bioavailability
- Getting all our nutrients from food is ideal but extremely difficult now, if not impossible
- We should eat as many nutrient-dense foods as possible daily, like organ meats and tons of veggies
- It is a good idea to use whole food-based supplements in addition to a healthy diet, just to have your bases covered.
Does starting a nutrient-dense diet seem daunting to you? It doesn’t have to be – that’s why I’m here! Reach out to me (either in a comment or on my contact page) and we will chat about your needs and how I can help you.
References
[1] https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/gene/MTHFR#
[2] Deep Nutrition: Why Your Genes Need Traditional Food by Catherine Shanahan, M.D. with Luke Shanahan
[3] Paleo Principles: The Science Behind the Paleo Template, Step-by-Step Guides, Meal Plans, and 200+ Healthy & Delicious Recipes for Real Life by Sarah Ballantyne, Ph.D.