Why Should You Be Taking Nutritional Supplements?
By Dr Ray Strand, M.D.
Physicians are basically disease-oriented and drug-oriented. After all, this is how we are trained. In medical school, we spend all of our time learning how to diagnose and treat disease. Even what we call preventive medicine is really just about early detection of disease. When I did a wellness physical on any of my patients, I was really looking for those silent diseases like elevated blood pressure, early diabetes, or elevated cholesterol. Pap smears, mammograms, and PSA's were done to detect early cancer. If I didn't find any disease, I would simply tell my patients that they were fine and that I did not need to see them for a couple of years.
As I began to research the medical literature about nutritional medicine, I realized that I was really doing nothing to actually prevent disease. I was merely just diagnosing and treating disease. Certainly, I was able to help most of my patients improve the quality of their life; however, with many of the degenerative diseases, I was merely treating symptoms and not changing the course of the disease. Could there be something that I was not aware of or did not learn in medical school that could be beneficial to my patients? After seeing some amazing health improvements in my patients who began taking high-quality nutritional supplements, I began to research the medical literature with a newly found zeal.
You will hear the argument that we need to supplement our diet because of the depleted nutrients in our food today. This is true; however, it is not the main reason to supplement your diet. The main reason is because of the tremendous number of free radicals we produce.
There are a certain number of free radicals produced when you simply metabolize your food. However, there are many things that increase the number of free radicals you produce:
Excessive Stress
Excessive Exercise
Pollutants in our air, food, and water
Sunlight
Radiation
Medication
Cigarette smoke
Our stressful lifestyles, polluted environment, and over-medicated society causes this generation to handle more free radicals than any previous generation. This is called oxidative stress. Remember, it is about balance. You need enough antioxidants available to manage the number of free radicals you produce.
Our body has the ability to make some of its own antioxidants. We are also able to get additional antioxidants from the foods we eat, especially from our fruits and vegetables. This is why you will usually see the recommendation of consuming 6 to 10 servings of fruits and vegetables each day. However, there is solid evidence that our food supply is depleted in nutrients. Because of our depleted soils, green harvesting, cold storage, processing, and food preparation methods, our foods have a significant decrease in nutritional value. This is certainly true of the micronutrients, especially the antioxidants. The decreased nutritional value of food is definitely a good reason to supplement your diet.
The medical literature now shows us that the optimal level of the antioxidants and their supporting nutrients needed to prevent or decrease the risk of chronic degenerative diseases is much greater than the amount we can obtain from our depleted food supply. Our best option to prevent or slow down this process of oxidative stress is to take high-quality, complete and balanced nutritional supplements the rest of our lives.
Today we are now able to get optimal levels of antioxidants by supplementing a healthy diet. Remember it is all about balance. To avoid oxidative stress, you want enough antioxidants to handle the free radicals produced.
Dr. Strand is a family physician who has been involved in a private family practice for over 30 years. For the past 12 years, he has focused his practice on nutritional and preventive medicine. He has written several best selling books like What Your DoctorDoesn’t Know about Nutritional Medicine, Death by Prescription, and Healthy for Life. He has lectured across the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, and Singapore on preventive and nutritional medicine. He has also appeared on many radio and television shows.
His primary focus is to guide and educate those individuals who desire to become more proactive in protecting their health or regaining their health. His “online” medical practice is located at www.drraystrand.com where he shares a wealth of information in regards to those healthy lifestyles that have been shown to truly protect your health or even allow you to regain your health if you have already lost it.
OPTIMUM HEALTH
ESSENTIALS
Many people believe that there is little evidence to support use of supplements - we show there is plenty of good evidence and give the references if people want to research it. We explain how supplements work and how they can complement conventional therapy. It gives people the ability to do something to really move back to better health and to also understand prevention of heart attacks and cancer etc. The second part of the book lists most of today’s common diseases and discusses the treatments that are available, both conventional and complementary, including supplements.
We talk about all supplements generically but stress the importance of high quality ones. So people can see what they need to do for any particular condition and use our book and then the Comparative Guide, to show that USANA makes the best supplements that fit our definition of a good one.
http://www.nexusresources.net/downloads/ToolsKnowHow_DietarySupplements.pdf