Alexa Fleckenstein M.D.

Last time we discuss vitamins for a while – I promise! Yesterday, in my tiredness, I forgot the most important reason why the vitamin bottle is not the answer, but good food is. We are hardwired to live with and thrive on the plants and animals of this Earth. For millions of years, through all of Evolution, have we been eating the stuff this Earth provides to us. Only during the last one hundred years we are trying to outsmart Nature and to improve on what the Earth gives us. The detection that there are chemical substances without which a person would die was a great breakthrough. They called those substances “vitamins” – from Latin “vita”, life. What chemists did not understand then – and many not even now – is that those are only the most conspicuous chemical compounds we cannot survive without. Many other compounds take longer to get depleted – but depleted they become. Perhaps only after years, but then diseases set in. We hear now a lot about anti-oxidants and polyphenols, but there are certainly others. How do I know? Here is the answer: Whenever population studies are done on people who still live close to the Earth – like the people on the Japanese island of Okinawa – they find that they live longer and have much fewer degenerative diseases, including cancer. One can conclude that they have something in their food which we don’t – and which our bodies miss out. Replacing with vitamins from a bottle is an extremely crude method to make up for healthy food. As we have discussed, too much of something good in too short time wreaks havoc on a body. And vitamins are only the tip of the iceberg – other compounds are lacking, too. Replacing vitamins makes those deficiencies only more dramatic and increases the imbalance in the body. Health is not a single substance - health come from the whole. A vitamin bottle has nothing to do with the web of life. If you think you can’t put a fresh meal every evening on the table because you are working so hard in your job: While I was in medical training and had a new baby (I know – looks like bad planning; l but I loved both and wouldn’t have wanted to miss out on either!), I still put good food on the table (I froze some ion my less busy days, but otherwise my food was self-prepared from fresh ingredients). Without good food, we die – more or less slowly. I wouldn’t want that for my family.