BBC2 Documentary Claims to Unwrap The Truth About Supplements

Dr Giles Yeo hosted a documentary on supplements on BBC2 recently and I was genuinely looking forward to watching it, even though the likelihood was, there would be some fairly negative reporting on the need for supplemental vitamins and minerals.

Facts: We spend £400million per year on supplements in the UK, with Vitabiotics (who trade under a few different names including Well Man and Well Woman) being the biggest with annual sales of £300million. Globally we spend £100billion on supplements. 50% of us have taken supplements at some point in our lives.

Five a Day: One of the biggest incentives for taking supplements is our apparent inability to consume our “5 a day” recommended intake of fruit and vegetables. According to the Government’s National Diet and Nutrition Survey, only 25% of us achieve this guideline!

So far so good, but…

What Are These Supplements Made From? This was the part I was looking forward to the most: A documentary by a scientist about supplements – surely they would dissect and discuss the ingredients in these supplements and make comparisons with those found in food. But not a word!

Why is This Important? It is fundamental to making fair comparisons between the health benefits of nutrients in food and nutrients in supplements. You have to compare like for like. Supplemental Vitamin E for example contains one eighth of Vitamin E found in food – quite a difference, and so the story goes with virtually all supplements, as demonstrated in the table below. The enormous benefit of our Foodstate nutrients is that they are identical in structure to food nutrients and this distinction is fundamental when making comparisons. Virtually all supplements are represented in the right hand column, and in this form we simply don’t recognise them and can’t absorb them properly.

What About Minerals? Primarily it was about Vitamins but there was brief mention of iron deficiency and Anaemia, and hence the need for some people to take iron supplements. Once again, no mention of where iron supplements come from. If you go to your Doctor you will be prescribed Ferrous Sulphate, an awful substance that is difficult to absorb and causes constipation. A normal dosage is 300-400mg, even though we only need 5-10mg of food iron per day. Once again, herein lies the problem: Ferrous sulphate doesn’t exist anywhere on this planet in live food. It is a rock known as melanterite and is used as a fertilizer, wood preservative, weed-killer, and pesticide. I could go on but you probably get the idea!

What About Our Farm Soils? The second biggest disappointment of the programme was its failure to mention our farm soil depletion. 25 years ago we were advised that European farm soils were 72% deplete of essential nutrients. It is estimated that 70% of us are Zinc deficient, 80% are magnesium deficient and over 80% of us are selenium deficient. We really needs these minerals for our health and we are not getting them from our diet, even those 25% of us who eat “5 a day”!

Antioxidants: Much was said about the group of supplements that we refer to as Antioxidants. These include the enzyme Co-Q10, Vitamins A, C and E, and the minerals Zinc & Selenium. I maintain that this group of nutrients are important for human health and prevent the damaging effects of “free radicals”, the rogue cells that pollute the body. Antioxidants bind to these toxins and get them out of the body. Selenium is particularly worthy of a brief mention because there is plenty of good research now that clearly establishes a link between selenium and the prevention of several common cancers. 

Conclusion: In many respects it was a disappointing documentary because no distinction was made between the nutrients in a salad and those found in supplements. Our mantra with foodstate supplements is: You need your nutrients is food form. If we were designed to consume synthetic, chemical nutrients then they would exist in live food, but the reality is, these supplemental nutrients don’t exist anywhere on this planet in live food. They are also created in enormous dosages, for example calcium is typically made in 1000mg inorganic tablets whereas ours is 30mg of food calcium because that is what we need daily.

Taking supplements is a personal choice but it is worth mentioning that virtually all human disease is the result of nutritional deficiency. Nutrients create bones and teeth, create our immune systems, support our organs, allow us to reproduce, produce cells, etc. etc. The countless brands demonstrated in this documentary were made up of the same synthetic, chemical materials. To maintain our health and support our immune systems we need nutrients in the food structure that we can recognise, absorb and use efficiently.