Articles and Recipes

As holistic healthcare providers, we try to harness the power of nature to nurture health, prevent disease and heal the whole person. We’d all agree that none of these things are possible if our patients aren’t able to get the nutrients they need, in the amounts they need them in. What’s adequate? While it depends on each patient, researchers recommend consuming 5-10 servings of fruits and vegetables daily to meet nutrient requirements for optimal health and for significantly reducing the risk of chronic diseases.²

But we've had patients that do everything right. They exercised, managed stress and ate organic foods. Yet they still suffer from nutritional deficiencies.

So, why is there a nutritional gap?

• Our lives are busy: consuming the variety of foods required to meet our nutritional needs is challenging, and often beyond many people’s reach.
• Our food has changed: processing, packaging and storage of fruits and vegetables decreases their nutritional value.

FACT: Phytochemicals in grains include plant sterols, phytases, phytoestrogens, tocotrienols, lignans, ellagic acid and saponins. Refining wheat causes about a 200- to 300-fold loss in phytonutrient content.²

SUPPLEMENTING TO FILL THE GAP

That’s where supplements come in.  We use nutritional supplements to try to fill the nutrient void left by our diets.  I say "try"because what I’ve found through years in clinical practice (and I’m sure you’ve found it as well) is that even with supplementation, there’s a gap.

So, why is there a gap even with supplements? And what can we do about it?

what we know About Supplements

Let’s start with what we know about supplements:

• Most nutritional supplements are synthetic, which means they’re manufactured in a lab.
• Synthetic supplements contain the isolated chemical form of vitamins and minerals, not the forms found in nature (vitamin C vs. ascorbic acid).

what we know About Nutrients

Here’s what we know about nutrients:

• Nutrients from plants are ideal because they reduce and may reverse³ the risk of chronic diseases.^3,4,5
• Vitamins and minerals in our food don’t exist in isolated forms: they come with other phytochemicals, such as enzymes, cofactors and antioxidants.
• It’s this mixture of phytochemicals that gives us the nutritional benefits associated with eating fruits and vegetables.^{1, 6, 7}
• Isolated forms of nutrients don’t provide the health benefits we need.²

What the Science Tells Us

What the scientific evidence tells us is that nutrients, antioxidants and bioactive compounds are best acquired through (whole) food. It also tells us that because the supplements we use today are isolated synthetic forms of nutrients, in the long term, there will always be a nutritional gap.

Vitamin Complex vs. Vitamin Isolates

For example, the synthetic form of vitamin C is ascorbic acid: it’s a crystalline isolate, synthetic fraction, or chemical distillate of the naturally-occurring vitamin C food complex that is often extracted from cornstarch. Vitamin C from food is more than just ascorbic acid. It includes rutin, bioflavonoids, factor K, factor J, factor P, tyrosinase, ascorbinogen, and other components.⁸ Each phytochemical in the vitamin C complex serves a separate function:

• Factor P for blood vessel strength,
• Factor J for oxygen-carrying capacity of red blood cells, and
• Tyrosinase is an essential enzyme for enhancing white blood cell differentiation.⁸

If any of these parts are missing, there’s no vitamin C- and no vitamin activity.  When our bodies receive only ascorbic acid, they’ll draw on their own stores to complete the vitamin C complex.  This is where the nutritional gap forms: in an effort to form the complete vitamin complex, our bodies become deficient in the other phytochemicals.  It’s not that ascorbic acid isn’t important. It’s very important. As the antioxidant outer shell, it’s the protector of all these other phytochemicals, enabling them to perform their individual functions.⁹ But isolated ascorbic acid is not enough to meet our vitamin C requirements.

Case and point: an in vitro study performed with digital ORP meter demonstrated that citrus food vitamin C has negative ORP and ascorbic acid has positive ORP.  To clear up oxidative damage, a negative ORP is required, so regardless of the quantity consumed, ascorbic acid can’t adequately replace vitamin C.²

I’m sure it comes as no surprise that this is true of all vitamin and mineral complexes. Below is a summary of studies comparing dietary and synthetic nutrients.

Nutrient	Subjects	Conclusion
Vitamin C	33 out of 46 epidemiological studies	Vitamin C from fruits and vegetables lowers the risk of oral, esophageal, stomach and breast cancers: the same effect is not seen with synthetic vitamin C supplementation10
Folic Acid	7 cohorts and 9 case-controlled studies, 354 subjects, 514 controls	Increasing dietary folate intake lowers the risk of colorectal cancer by 25%; synthetic folate is not protective and may stimulate prostate cancer11
Vitamin E	895 non-diabetic adults and followed for 5 years	Protective effect of vitamin E may exist within the range of intake from food, but not with synthetic vitamin E supplementation.12
Calcium	23,980 participants, aged 35-64 years old free of major cardiovascular events, 11-year follow up	Dietary calcium users had a 31% lower risk of myocardial infarct, while users of synthetic calcium plus dietary calcium had an 86% increase in the risk of myocardial infarct. Users of synthetic calcium only had a 139% increase in risk for myocardial infarct.13

Nutrient Postal Codes

To understand why there’s a difference, we only have to look at nutrients at the molecular level to see that natural molecules differ substantially from synthetic ones.  In 1999, Dr. Gunter Blobel, a cell and molecular biologist at Rockefeller University in New York, received the Nobel Prize in Physiology for discovering that proteins possess inherent signals/information that determine which cells attract and absorb them and where in the cell those proteins belong.¹⁴ Nutrients don’t wander aimlessly inside the body: instead, it’s as if they have postal codes that direct them to cells containing receptors with that same postal code.  Synthetic isolates can’t match the efficiency and effectiveness of that system.  It also helps to explain why food-based nutrients are more absorbable and bioavailable than their synthetic isolates.

Fill the Gap with Food-form supplements

So we understand why there’s a gap. Now, what can we do about it?

The answer is simple. Fill it with nutrients that come from whole foods.

And I don’t mean nutrients that are grown on yeast. I’m talking about concentrated, whole food supplements: the ones that are made by harvesting raw fruits and vegetables, and delivering without additives that impede digestion and absorption (inorganic minerals, binders, fillers and coatings).

Can plant-based powders improve health? In a word? Yes. Scientific studies show that supplementing with dehydrated concentrates of mixed fruit and vegetable powders improves antioxidant levels¹⁵, as well as various functional indices of health, when compared to placebos¹⁶.

Conclusion

Dietary nutrients energize the human cell because they are the most direct connection between the sun, our plants and our bodies.  Nature’s food is living food. A complex, energy-emanating substance that is harmonious with the human organism. 

If you or your patients are interested in organic, vegan, non-GMO whole food nutrients that are free of dairy, casein and gluten, you should learn more about Pranin’s PureFood line of raw, food-form supplements.

References

1. Potential Synergy of Phytochemicals in Cancer Prevention: Mechanism of Action. Lui, RH. 12, 2004, J Nutr, Vol. 134, pp. 3479S-3485S.
2. Fowkes, SW. Antioxidants & Reduction. 2000, Vol. 7, 9, pp. 6-8.
3. Campbell, TC. The China Study. 2004.
4. Fruit and Vegetable Intake and Risk of Major Chronic Disease. Hung, HC, Joshipura, KJ and al., et. 3, s.l. : J Natl Cancer Ints, 2004, Vol. 21, pp. 1577-1584.
5. Food Sources and Dietary Intakes of Vitamin K-1 (Phylloquinone) in the American Diet: Data from the FDA Total Diet Study. Booth, SL, Pennington, JA and Sadowski, JA. 2, s.l. : J Am Diet Assoc, 1996, Vol. 96, pp. 149-154.
6. Antioxidant and antiproliferative activities of fruits. Sun, J, et al., et al. s.l. : J. Agric. Food Chem, 2002, Vol. 50, pp. 7449–7454.
7. Antioxidant and antiproliferative activities of vegetables. Chu, Y.-F., et al., et al. s.l. : J. Agric. Food Chem, 2000, Vol. 50, pp. 6910–6916.
8. Vitamin News. Lee, R. s.l. : The International Foundation for Nutrition and Health, 1942.
9. Lee, R. Good Food and Good Health: Some Fundamental Facts. [interv.] Address to the New England Naturopathic Physicians. Waterbury, November 10, 1946.
10. Vitamins for Chronic Disease Prevention in Adults. KM, Fairfield and RH, Fletcher. 23, s.l. : JAMA, 2002, Vol. 287, pp. 3116-3126.
11. Folate Intake and Colorectal Cancer: A Meta-Analytical Approach. MA, Sanjoaquin, N, Allen and al, et. 5, s.l. : Int J Cancer 2005, 2005, Vol. 113, pp. 825-828.
12. Plasma and Dietary Vitamin E in Relation to Incidence of Type 2 Diabetes. EJ, Mayer-Davies, DJ, Zaccaro and al., et. 12, s.l. : Diabetes Care, 2002, Vol. 25, pp. 2172-2177.
13. Associations of Dietary Calcium Intake and Calcium Supplementation with Myocardial Infarction and Stroke Risk and Overall Cardiovascular Mortality in the Heidelberg Cohort of the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition Study (EPIC-Hei. Li, K and Kaaks, R et al. s.l. : Heart, 2012, Vol. 98, pp. 920-925.
14. Proteins Connecting the Nuclear Pore Complex with the Nuclear Interior. Strombio-de-Castillia, C, Blobel, G and Rou, t MP. 5, s.l. : J Cell Biol, 1999, Vol. 144, pp. 839-855.
15. Four week supplementation with mixed fruit and vegetable juice concentrates increased protective serum antioxidants and folate and decreased plasma homocysteine in Japanese subjects. Kawashima, A, et al., et al. 3, s.l. : Asia Pac J ClinNutr, 2007, Vol. 16, pp. 411-421.
16. Immunity and Antioxidant Capacity in Humans Is Enhanced by Consumption of a Dried, Encapsulated Fruit and Vegetable Juice Concentrate. Nantz, M, et al., et al. 10, s.l. : J Nutr, 2006, Vol. 136, pp. 2606-2610.