Nutritional Deficiency

You hear a lot about nutritional deficiency, but it does not mean the same thing it used to. In previous centuries, people had deficiencies because they could not get enough food to get enough of certain nutrients. Now, people get plenty of food, but it has largely been robbed of important elements. The common nutrients are more than prevalent, but micronutrients, many of which have not been studied well, if at all, are often completely lacking in a contemporary diet due to refining of foods and overprocessing.

Supplements are often promoted as the answer to everything. Take another pill to fix your health. In reality, the best sources of nutrients are foods - whole and fresh foods. I cannot believe how many diets recommend that you eat their "healthy" foods, and then they also sell you a bundle of supplements. If the food was really healthy, no supplements would be needed. In fact, even with weight loss diets, they will be more likely to succeed long term if they rely on truly healthy foods, and not on supplements.

Now, there ARE reasons for supplements, but ironically, some of the reasons for NEEDING them make it impossible for the supplement to actually do any good. Some of the reasons and barriers are:

1. Unhealthy diet. Supplements won't help, because they contain the same elements that have already been added to the refined foods.

2. Malabsorption. If your body does not process a specific vitamin or mineral well in the digestive system, you may end up with a serious deficiency. Unfortunately, it isn't as simple as taking a supplement to fix the problem, because depending on how the digestive system is malfunctioning, and precisely where the problem is occurring, a supplement may not be absorbed any better than the nutrient was from the foods that it did not get enough from. If the nutrient can be taken in a slightly different form, or through means other than an oral supplement, the results can be quite different.

3. Improper usage at the cellular level. In some cases, a deficiency may exist because the element does not get where it needs to go at a cellular level. Or a person may actually have sufficient amounts of the nutrient, but their body may not utilize it correctly after it gets into their blood stream. A supplement may or may not be helpful, for the same reasons as for malabsorption. Often, the key to solving this problem is a supplement other than the one that is malfunctioning.

Basically, unless something goes wrong with the processing of foods and energy within the body, supplements are not needed. Odd for me to say that when I have lists of supplements and their uses on this site, but the fact is that diabetes IS precisely one of those conditions where deficiencies occur secondary to another disease process. And whether a particular supplement helps or not will depend on how the deficiency is occurring in the first place. Because diabetes can originate differently in each individual, and because the disease then progresses in a slightly different manner in each one, no one can tell you ahead of time whether a supplement will help or not, because they cannot predict how your body will process it.

Overall, I feel that the information presented by the supplement marketing community is exaggerated. Supplements are not, in general, the solution to the physical ills of our society. They can provide compensating factors where known problems exist after diet has already been adjusted, but they should not ever be the first line strategy. After you eat healthy, then you fine tune as needed with carefully selected and tested supplements. Tested means that you choose those with a reasonably verifiable effect, and then you test them on yourself - by introducing them one at a time, giving sufficient time to monitor results before introducing another, and of course careful monitoring and evaluation of the results.

When they are used, they should be used with caution, and chosen carefully.

Written by Laura Wheeler, Owner of Firelight Business Enterprises, Inc.