“Are man-made vitamins harmful?” How much is too much?” What kind of damage do too many (much) vitamins cause?”
Vitamins are organic compounds, which means that they are carbon-containing. They cannot be duplicated in labs. Vitamins sold to the public today are either synthetic vitamins or crystalline-pure fractions of vitamin complexes. A fraction of a vitamin, whether natural or synthetic at best, is a drug and can only have a drug-like effect in the body, which is a stimulatory effect – not a physiological or curative benefit. Taking vitamins as supplements can seriously impair the most important of bodily functions by contributing to biochemical imbalance.
Vitamins can be effective in the body’s cells only through their combined effects as a “complex functioning mechanism” rather than a single chemical effect. For example, ascorbic acid sold today as vitamin C is not the true complex vitamin C as it is found in foods and yet it is labeled in its supplement form as vitamin C. Ascorbic acid is only one part of several parts that make up the complex vitamin C. Ascorbic acid can be made cheaply in labs by combining corn syrup and sulfuric acid. It is ridiculous to remove the ascorbic acid from the vitamin C complex and call this single component the “real vitamin.”
A vitamin supplement is simply not the whole product. It is only a fragment. A vitamin supplement leaves out many other parts which may be tiny, percentage-wise, but significant just the same. When we take supplements, it is rather like taking statements out of context; you might get the full benefit, but more than likely what you get is distorted and not the full picture.
Picking and choosing the elements you think your body needs is chancy at best. We are designed to operate as a whole entity, and this is why we should be getting our nutrients as whole entities as well.
You can actually take enough supplements, in an individual nutrient form, to cause symptoms of a deficiency of that or other nutrients. For example, if you take a vitamin E supplement, you need to also take the mineral zinc to maintain normal blood concentrations of vitamin E. However, if you take too much zinc, you can block absorption of copper and selenium. This is the same with taking too much vitamin C, you can also block selenium absorption in your body. Vitamins are dependent on minerals to function in the body. If you start the game of picking and choosing single vitamins and single minerals to take, you are playing a dangerous game that can cause a terrible chemical imbalance in your body. Isolated vitamins and minerals sold in supplement form do not have the same suitability for human metabolism as those found in whole foods. Our bodies were not designed to break down these inorganic supplements.
The best source of supplementation today is food-derived supplements like bee pollen, wheat grass, blue-green microalgae, wheat sprouts, etc. These supplements offer us all the ingredients necessary for our bodies to function properly. Nutrients cannot work well in the body when taken in an isolated form. All nutrients work as a team to build and support health. Nature has always been the best manufacturer (provider) of our foods and the best teacher if we care to learn her lessons. The body understands “natural law.” Just give it the full range of good foods and whole food supplements and it knows what to do to create optimum health and vitality.
