A popular question at the moment is, “Why do we need supplements?” We evolved for the last 200,000 years without any problem.

Didn’t we?

You couldn't always just pop down to your local pharmacy or log in to Amazon or visit your neighbourhood supplement store and buy yourself a bottle of instant health. It wasn’t that long ago that you couldn't buy Vitamin D₃ or Vitamin C or any of this stuff. We didn't even know what it was and yet somehow we managed to survive.

From an evolutionary point of view, supplements are kind of irrelevant.

But, right now, we're living so out of sync with our evolutionary biology that we need to really look at the facts about what's happening with our food supply, with our nutrient levels - both in our food and in our bodies - and the consequences of that for our health.

So, under the following conditions, I don't think anybody needs supplements.

One. You have to hunt and gather your own wild food.

Two. You have to drink pure, clean water.

Three. You cannot have chronic stress.

Four. You have to exercise all the time as part of your lifestyle.

Five. You have to sleep nine hours a night - going to bed with the sun and waking with the sun. 

Six. You cannot be exposed to environmental toxins.

and, finally,

Seven. You need to grow your own food on land that hasn’t been depleted of its organic nutrition.

Now, if that's you, then no, you don't need any supplements. But the rest of us? We need to pay attention.

After years of vigorously testing the nutritional status of our clients, I'm beyond shocked at the level of nutritional deficiencies I see. And, our clientele is generally well-off. They understand health and nutrition and are trying to do the right thing.

When I see a new client who eats junk food and fast food and processed food, who doesn't know anything about health and nutrition, the first stage of our process is to understand their health goals and then run some tests to understand their current nutritional status. The results are terrifying!

What we see is mirrored in the National Diet and Nutrition Study delivered by NatCen Social Research. This is a large, annual UK governmental survey where they look at the health of the population. They don't just ask questions and trust the patient’s answers. They actually go and test people to see what their nutritional results look like and, based on this really robust data, it is clear that over 90% of us are deficient in something. The most glaring deficiencies are; about 90% are deficient in omega-3 fats. 50% are deficient in magnesium. 25% in iron. Zinc is 40%. 89% of women in child bearing years are deficient in folate.

We've got major deficiencies in key nutrients that are really essential for biology. And, what people don't understand is, nutrients have a lot of functions.

If you take a drug, let's say a statin, it basically has one primary action; it blocks the enzyme that produces cholesterol. It also has some other effects. It actually induces something called nitric oxide synthase which is good for producing nitric oxide which may reduce inflammation but it  blocks CoQ10 production making the patient susceptible to muscle injury.

Nutrients  are different.

Magnesium has three hundred different enzymes that it regulates. Zinc. Same thing; it has 200. They have multiple functions throughout multiple parts of our cellular physiology. If we don't have them it's like our cellular machinery can't do what it's supposed to do.

Enzymes are the catalysts that change one chemical to another chemical in our bodies enabling them to do what they’re supposed to do. If one third of our DNA codes for enzymes, that's important!

To work properly, enzymes need coenzymes, or co-factors, which are usually vitamins, minerals and also phytonutrients. There's a little key that goes into the enzyme and turns it on. That key is usually a nutrient; Vitamin C, Vitamin B6, folate...

For example; to make tryptophan into serotonin, which is your "happy mood chemical", you take the amino acid from tryptophan which comes from food and that, then, has to get converted to serotonin. That process requires Vitamin B₆.

Or, the thyroid is another good example. In order for the thyroxine that your thyroid gland produces to be converted into the active thyroid hormone T3, you have an enzyme there which actually requires selenium. If you don’t have selenium, it can't work.

And, at risk of sounding really geeky, if you want to see the thyroid action on the nucleus where it actually does all its work to control metabolism, you need Vitamin D as a cofactor to help it function at the nuclear level to create the downstream effects which is to turn on different genes that regulate your metabolism (among other things).

Nutrients are such a critical part of our biology that if we don't have enough of the required nutrients our health degrades.

The great vitamin discovery happened around 120 years ago. The name “Vitamin” comes from a scientist named Casamir Funk who coined the term “Vitamine” in 1912 as something that’s needed for your health and vitality. The word comes from two parts; “vita” meaning “Life” and “amine” because originally vitamins were thought to contain amino acids.

All of this became important because humans started refining grains in the 1800s.

The grain mill was a great discovery. You could refine grains which allowed for a smoother and whiter flour product creating a “nicer” version of the bread people had been eating for thousands of years. What happened, however, was the refining process took out all the nutrients and all that was left was the starch. People then started feeding the refined grains to chickens and the chickens all got really sick. And, then they started feeding it to prisoners, and the prisoners all got really sick with terrible Vitamin deficiency diseases like Scurvy, beriberi and pellagra.

These are really terrible diseases that can kill you. Or, maybe they’ll just make you demented or turn your skin into a giant raw mess - just from a little vitamin deficiency.

The puzzle of each vitamin was solved through the work and contributions of epidemiologists, physicians, physiologists, and chemists. Research on the vitamins that are related to major deficiency syndromes began when the germ theory of disease was dominant and dogma held that only four nutritional factors were essential: proteins, carbohydrates, fats, and minerals. (Note the similarity to the dogma that is today’s NHS “5-A-Day” campaign) Clinicians soon recognized scurvy, beriberi, rickets and pellagra as specific vitamin deficiencies, rather than diseases, due to infections or toxins. The great news is, these conditions needed very little amounts of vitamins to have profound effects.

Imagine if there was a drug that cost pennies, had no side effects and literally worked in days to cure illness. Sounds pretty amazing, doesn’t it. Well, that's what vitamins do.

Take someone who’s vitamin deficient, someone who’s got scurvy for example, and give them Vitamin C. Within a few days they are better. and everything's good.

Everybody's got Vitamin C, right? Not necessarily so. Modern diets and the poor state of our food means somehow 10% of the western world are deficient in Vitamin C at a level that would cause scurvy.

So, long story short, our food supply has been hybridised to breed out nutrition. We can eat bread for starch, and maybe a little protein, but not for nutrients. Our food is also grown in soils that have very little organic matter and plants can't extract the nutrients from the soil. There are nutrients in the soil but the plants need the microorganisms in the soil to act as symbiotic helpers to extract those nutrients from the soil that then go into the plant.

Broccoli today is 50% less nutritious than it was 50 years ago.

Compound this with the fact we humans have increased nutrient needs because we're under chronic stress and we're exposed to environmental toxins. There were 80,000 new chemicals introduced into the marketplace since the early 1900s. Our bodies have to deal with all of the chemical reactions and detoxification and this all requires nutrients.

We are also under a tremendous amount of emotional stress in modern society. Our bodies use a lot more magnesium when combatting stress. A vicious circle starts because our bodies are much more susceptible to the effects of stress when we have reduced magnesium which was reduced by the stress in the first place. We need to supplement our diets with magnesium.

What about Omega-3 fats? We don't really get those in our modern diet because we don’t eat wild food anymore. Occasionally, maybe we eat some fish, but that's got mercury in it.

All of these problems have come about because of our nutritional environment. Now, more than ever, people need foundational nutritional support.

That’s not just a general opinion I chose to hold, but actually something based on hard scientific data.

"But, what about those scientific studies", I hear you say. "Aren’t they suspect?"

People go on about, “Oh, all the Vitamin studies showed that they don't prevent heart attacks. They don't prevent cancer. They don't do this, don't do that” or, “They may have side effects”. 

I think it's confusing for people because there are loads of big studies and often they don't appear to show a result. That doesn't mean that a supplement is not effective or not important. All too often these studies are poorly designed or they don't take into account the biology of the nutrients.

If, for example, I give Vitamin E to a bunch of smoking, overweight, not exercising, junk-food-eating people, it’s not going to do anything. Supplements are not designed to replace a healthy diet and lifestyle.

Scientists did this large study called The Carrot Study where they gave beta carotene to smokers who were at high risk for lung cancer. Clinicians had observed that smokers who ate lots of fruits and vegetables containing beta carotene were healthier than their high-risk, smoking peers. But, when they actually gave the beta carotene as a supplement, the results showed more cancer. Now the scientists were like, “Oh, this is terrible! Something’s not working”.

This is a perfect example of what Michael Pollan calls “nutritionism”, which is reductionism in nutrients. What he means by this is you basically go, Oh, it's maybe this single thing. We'd better focus on (insert isolated nutrient here).”

It doesn't work like that.

Think about Cristiano Ronaldo, arguably the best football player in history. If you put him on the pitch by himself, even against Norwich City F.C., he could not win a single game. Nutrients work as a team. If you don't have all of them, your body chemistry kind of gets all gummed up and it can actually cause worse problems.

Basically, the Carrot Study gave high doses of beta carotene to the patients. If you actually understand basic biology and how antioxidants work in the system, they work as a team. The way they work is they donate an electron to some damaged tissue or free radical like an oxidised compound in the body. An antioxidant will actually help deal with oxidative stress or “rusting” in the body. But, the way it does it is it donates one of its electrons; then it becomes a radical.

Vitamin C is a great antioxidant - some would say the Cristiano Ronaldo of the Vitamin world. But to work, it donates one of its electrons and then it becomes an ascorbyl radical, which is highly dangerous. But, don't worry. You've got Vitamin E to donate an electron and give it to the Vitamin C and it becomes a tocopherol radical. That, then, has to be dealt with by all these systems like lipoic acid and that, in turn, is dealt with by glutathione.

So, you've got a whole system. 

If you don't have all the antioxidants, and you don't have the final pathways of glutathione, you're going to get in trouble. You actually create more oxidative stress and more damage if you just give a high dose of a single nutrient.

Then, of course, we have to contend with how conventional medicine views supplements. This is really important. Many times doctors, and even our friends and family will say, “Oh, supplements. They just create expensive urine”. They insist supplements are a waste of time because “you'll get everything you need from food”.

We’ve already discussed the poor nutritional state of our soil and, provided you use supplements that are of high quality with high bioavailability, your body will take in what it needs and let go of the rest – which is exactly what it is supposed to do.

Basically, everybody should be boosting their diet with the right forms of nutrients in the right balance. In other words, it needs to be bio available.

For example. You can go to the supermarket or drugstore or online and buy magnesium oxide. The problem is, magnesium oxide is the cheapest form of magnesium and it's poorly absorbed. Or, you could be looking to buy folic acid. There’s a good chance your genetics won’t allow you to convert it to the effective form of folic acid called methylfolate. You need to buy methylfolate (5-MTHF) which is a stable and methylated form of folate. Methylfolate fulfils all the known uses of folic acid. Many supplements contain folic acid, however, folic acid has to undergo a number of steps within the body in order to be converted to the active form and some bodies simply don’t do the conversion very well. It's really important to know what your body needs and to supplement from a company that focuses on therapeutic products and these processes.

Fish oil is really important. There are many different kinds of fish oil and plenty to consider when you buy fish oil;

• Where it comes from?
  
• Are all of the toxins and mercury out of it?
• Is it oxidised?
• What's it preserved with?
• What kind of animal is it from? 

That’s a lot of questions.

There are also ways of processing the fish oil to make up the supplement that preserve a lot of the benefits of eating fish. This isn't used in the cheaper supermarket supplements.

What's so amazing about eating fish is that there are compounds that have been recently discovered that help regulate our immune systems. Our immune systems are very overactive and, as a result, we’re suffering with accelerated amounts of inflammation. There are techniques now that don’t destroy these pro-resolving mediators found in fish and actually retains them in the fish oil.

As we pointed out earlier, 90 plus percent of people are deficient in omega-3 fats. Individuals who are at the right Omega index had an extra three to five years life expectancy. We’re talking about essential fatty acids; they’re essential for life. Every cell membrane in your body is made out of them. Your brain is 60% made out of essential fatty acids. Your skin, your hair, your nails. All your body functions require essential fatty acids.

Essential fatty acids regulate inflammation including prostate gland inflammation. They regulate metabolism and blood sugar. If you’re deficient in them, you’re in trouble so it's really critical to get it right.

Vitamin D. 80% of us are deficient, or insufficient, in Vitamin D.

COVID highlighted the consequences of this because when you look at the data around COVID. If your Vitamin D level is higher you were actually 97% protected from ending up in the hospital or dying. At Vitamin D levels over 50 nmol/L, there were zero deaths. That is better than any vaccine out there. People are pretty much ignoring that for the most part.

A couple of important things to remember with Vitamin D. You need Vitamin D₃ which is different than a lot of doctors are prescribing. An important consideration with D₃ is Vitamin K₂. K₂ is also a fat soluble Vitamin that works in conjunction with Vitamin D₃ and helps with the improvement in cardiovascular and bone health. K₂ should be made by your gut bacteria, but it's often not because our guts are messed up. And, one more consideration, K₂ is available as MK-4 and MK-7 and it’s important to understand the different bioavailability and half-life issues of these supplements.

A couple other supplements to add for starters would be magnesium or, of course, magnesium rich foods and a probiotic because our guts are all so messed up. That is the stack that we like to start with.

Our The Possible You program is all about working with you to understand where you are today and where you want to be.  Supplementation is an important part of that and we can help you make sure your supplement stack is made up of the right combination of quality nutrients.