What is the Best Nutrient?

August 31, 2010 admin No comments

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Hi,

Just what is the best nutrient? First let’s define nutrient.

A nutrient is a chemical that an organism needs to live and grow or a substance used in an organism’s metabolism which must be taken in from its environment.¹

If you knew what it was you could eat lots of it and improve your health quite a bit. Right? Not so fast.

It is not quite that easy.

As science has progressed it has been easier to isolate nutrients in the food we eat.

Once a nutrient is isolated, then someone in the diet or pharmaceutical industry trys to make it synthetically.

Then they market it as the next best thing.

Almost every vitamin, mineral, antioxidant, phytonutrient and so on has gone through this process.

So why aren’t we all healthy?

Because it is not that simple. Simply isolating a nutrient does not mean it will perform as well as it did in the food it was isolated from.

And sometimes putting these isolated nutrients in other products makes for some strange combos.

Would you have a glass of orange juice with a meal of fish? Maybe, maybe not.

But most would not think anything about drinking some orange juice with Omega 3′s in it (which you get from fish).

Maybe some things weren’t meant to be.

Sometimes initial studies show a great benefit with an isolated nutrient. This great benefit might have come from an in vitro experiment, or a study on other animals.

It might not have had the greatest controls. Further studies might not show the same benefits. This has happened with Vit C, Vit E, Vit D and the list goes on and on.

Yet, eating lots of fruits and vegetables has been proven time and time again to provide these great benefits.

So, if you can isolate the nutrients and increase them in a pill, why don’t you get the same benefits?

Because Mother Nature knows best. A fruit or vegetable is not made up of just one nutrient. It has many, sometimes hundreds of nutrients within itself.

This combination and synergy is what makes all the difference in the world.

That is why an eating plan with lots of variety of natural foods, including fruits and vegetables will provide a host of benefits that you will never get from an isolated nutrient.

This is true even if you could isolate every nutrient and take them individually.

We still don’t know every nutrient and we don’t know exactly how they work together.

So that simple apple is quite a complex nutrient machine.

So what is the best nutrient? All of them in a natural food.

Make the big majority of your meals with as many nutrients as you can. Then indulging in a chocolate sundae every once in a while isn’t going to wreck you.

Thanks,

Mike Val

1. Whitney, Elanor and Sharon Rolfes. 2005. Understanding Nutrition, 10th edition, p 6. Thomson-Wadsworth.