5 thoughts on “It isn’t just the vitamin that protects the body”

  1. When I was growing up, well a teen-ager, I had an aversion to vitamins. It was my oddball theory that our bodies evolved over eons to be able to process nurtients from food into a usable forms. If we spent too many generations getting our vitamins from pills, I surmised, we might genetically alter the human form so that it could no longer process the nutrients in foods, but required processed vitamins. Fine, until some day when there was a major war or disaster and we no longer had the technology or facilities to make vitamins. Then what would we do?

    Maybe my oddball theory wasn’t so odd after all.

  2. I reckon that there are few experts that would disagree about the benefits of fruits over vitamins alone (fiber, moisture, antioxidants, etc). The problem is that most people do not get enough of the naturally occurring vitamins because they don’t eat right. So, better take those vitamins unless you are getting more than five servings of a variety of mostly fresh, organic fruits and vegetables everyday.

    Your body takes the chemicals presented to it and uses what it can and attempts to discard the rest. It really doesn’t know if the vitamin comes from food, or from liquid vitamins, a chewable tablet, or a pill. Fresh organic produce simply provides more of the other things we need from our diet.

    I’m no expert, but I think the genetic alteration Debby is referring to would take millions of years. We still have the starvation response in our genetics, established over millions of years, which contributes to many people being overweight today. Those genes have not left us in this era of plentiful food and the vitamin pill.

  3. Keep in mind that humans also probably haven’t evolved away from a shorter life expectancy. There are many things the body does less well after, let’s say, 50 because nature did not expect us to live so long. Taking the proper vitamin can help the body overcome its own limitations.

    Also, for most of human history, we were hunters/scavengers and much of the nutrients we needed came from the dead cells in animals. Frankly, I’ll take a vitamin daily before I start sucking marrow out of bones.

  5. NewMexiKen’s dinner tonight: Fresh strawberries, blueberries and pineapple, a banana and an orange, with yogurt and a splash of orange juice. Blend.

    And there’s my daily ration of five fresh fruits.

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