Vitamin supplements

Hey all
I have no experience in this area and am looking for someone who may point me in the right direction

We want to supplement our diets with more trace minerals that we are not getting from the food...

Does anyone suggest a supplement with the 90 trace minerals in them,,,  one that they trust?
tks

Why dont you improve your diet ? rather than pop pills ? seaweeds Nuts and fruit often contain all you need

I stopped taking supplements years ago and I noticed a tremendous improvement in my health.  

I found it very difficult to find supplements without fillers that I was sensitive to, without soy, and within my budget.  From my point of view, it's a lot like buying chemical fertilizers - a voluntary waste of money.  

However, not everyone's like me.  Due to my sensitivities, I make everything I eat from scratch - and I mean from scratch.  Many of the ingredients I have to grow myself because the store bought equivalent contain things that make me ill.  I'm very careful to eat as much variety as possible, to pay attention to cravings in case they mean a deficiency, to have my bloodwork done on a regular basis to make certain I'm not deficient in anything, and basically, I take a very active interest in consuming a truely balanced diet.

Other people aren't like me.  They have busy lives and don't/can't/won't take the effort to eat right.  I know one person who feels they have to work an extra 10 hours a week to be able to afford their 'healthy' food and an extra 1 to 2 hours a week to afford the vitamins.  But if they made the food themselves, they wouldn't have to work the extra hours at a job, they could make healthy food in 2 hours a week, with maybe an extra hour to grow it.  I think it's a bit like Gert and Fred.  

Yet other people actually do need the vitamins to maintain a healthy balance.  Even if it's just short term to improve their health so they can get on a path towards a healthy diet.  I don't have any experience with this as it wasn't until I stopped taking vitamins that I started feeling better and my minerals/vitamins levels in my bloodwork improved.  But maybe others do and they can chime in as to what has worked for them in the past.

I second the call for eating seaweed, nuts, and fruit.  Also, as much variety in the diet as possible.  Eating 100 ingredients a day (or at least making that a goal) is one massive step people can take towards healthy diet.  Eating food from trusted sources.  Avoiding processed food.  Discovering what your body needs in the way of foods to avoid, foods it appreciates, and when to eat.  Learning how to prepare the food in a way that is affordable, time-saving and maximizes the nutritional content of the ingredients (like not drinking coffee while eating beans, as coffee can block the absorption of many trace minerals - for example black bean and coffee brownies)

This is the brand I'm taking.  I tried to research and find one which rated as actually containing the nutrients which it claims to contain (many don't) and doesn't have toxic gick in it. https://www.gardenoflife.com/products-for-life-categories/product-families/mykind-organics   I have had difficulty managing to eat a healthy diet, because of not being a good gardener (black thumb) and not having a large food budget or ability to drive around sourcing healthy food.  I thought I was having symptoms of deficiencies, so I've been taking these pills and feeling less bad.

It's good you found something that works for you.  Thanks for sharing the link.  
Different bodies are different, so what may not work for me, may work for others.  I feel it's very important to customize one's nutrition (be it diet or supplements) to their body.  


However, thinking more about trace minerals.  I would be suspicious of any make that puts a whole wack of them together in one pill.  Quite often with trace minerals, it's the ratio that's more important than the volume.  Most diets have an excess in one or more minerals, so perhaps it would be more beneficial to focus only on the minerals one specifically needs.

On top of that, many minerals interact with each other to block or amplify the absorption/function of the others. For example, copper, zinc, calcium, magnesium and selenium are all related.  Some like Zn, can prevent the absorption of Cu (that's why they don't put zinc and copper in the same pill - they can cancel each other out).  Mg in some forums can amplify the absorption of Ca and Zn.  and so on.  It's quite complicated.  

The time of year, daylight exposure, weather, and a whole host of factors, other than diet, all affect how your body absorbs minerals.  

So much to think about.  Yes, it would be easier to buy a pill with everything in it... But would it be any more useful than cutting back on processed foods and eating something mineral rich like pulses (dry beans and peas)?  These are chockablock full of trace minerals.
It's my experience that eating a balanced, healthy and organic diet can be done on a shoestring budget even without growing a garden.  It's just most people have never been taught how or even where to look for such know-how.

R Ranson wrote:But would it be any more useful than cutting back on processed foods and eating something mineral rich like pulses (dry beans and peas)?

It is for me.  I experience tremendous stress over food, especially lately, and taking a supplement reduces the stress.  I have to take a supplement anyway for B12.

Why is another person's choice being debated here?

Tyler Ludens wrote:

R Ranson wrote:But would it be any more useful than cutting back on processed foods and eating something mineral rich like pulses (dry beans and peas)?

It is for me.  I experience tremendous stress over food, especially lately, and taking a supplement reduces the stress.  I have to take a supplement anyway for B12.

Why is another person's choice being debated here?

My apologies for coming across that way.  I know I'm pretty evangelical about diet.  Over a decade ago modern medicine gave me a few weeks to live, with no hope of survival.  I attribute what health I have now to how and what I eat.  I'm not 100% cured, but I'm still here.  I am able to do crazy things that they said I could never do again, like walk, talk, type, &c.  I hope you can see, my passion for diet is a very personal one.  

But it is just that.  A personal one.  What worked for me may no work for others.  

What I feel:

each body is unique, there is no one path that fits everyone.  Do what works for you.  If it's working, there's nothing wrong with it.

I can only write from personal experience and from what I've read - I do not have all the answers

however, I do feel that is is possible to eat healthy, earth-friendly food, on a limited budget - it's just most people have never learned how.

I'm also a terrible miser.  I won't pay money for something I can do myself.  This is why I don't buy chemical fertilizers or vitamin supplements.

The question was about trace minerals.  These are tricky to get right, especially when we start long term supplements - different minerals often work against each other.  I would be leery of combining a huge amount of different ones in a single supplement.  The thing about trace minerals is that we don't need much of them to be healthy.  When the diet (and body) is balanced, one can get enough trace minerals from food alone.  However, most of us aren't starting from a balanced place.  In those situations, I can see a huge advantage to using some supplements... but from my point of view, these supplements would have even more advantage if they can be customized, to some extent, to what that specific person needs.  With vitamins, it's not so important, but with trace minerals, I think it is pretty important not to take too much without learning what one's body needs.  

thanks for all the reply's guys... We do eat fairly well , especially when we go to South America. However here in the states its hard to find organics that are non gmo and we were hoping to find some suggestions like above for the beans and peas like things that have a lot of minerals in them....

T

I supplement my vitamin D... my body just can't make enough to keep up with what I actually need to be healthy. Unfortunately I don't have a good recommendation for a particular brand. I have noticed that some vitamins now advertise themselves as containing 'whole food sources' of nutrients.

Maybe there are a few particularly nutrient dense foods that can be eaten occasionally as a natural vitamin supplement. I think that's actually the point about the current trend of 'super' foods. I know most individual foods don't have a concentration of nutrients comparable to a vitamin supplement. Most of the ones I know of are tropical fruits. If you look at the nutritional information on a bottle of Bolthouse juice it looks like a full multivitamin.

Maybe some of the people who don't use vitamins can recommend easy to prepare foods that can address particular nutrient needs. An example for me is that when I feel low on iron I eat red kidney beans and tomatoes. Strangely there is no iron in the tomatoes, but my body craves them. Learned recently that tomatoes help the body absorb iron.

None of this is to suggest you shouldn't look for a good multi-vitamin. I recognize that there are many circumstances where it just isn't practical to expect a balanced diet. Nearly any form of traveling, for instance, will completely disrupt a normal diet. That's not even addressing individual medical needs, like me and vitamin D. Hopefully someone will soon pop up with the information you're actually looking for.

I am slightly confused what GMO s are in organic beans here in Europe it's very clear . Organic food does not contain  GMOs
Are the rules that different in the USA?

David

I like Life Extension Foundation (www.lef.org).  High quality, backed by research, tremendous source of information.  They have a multi-vitamin, multi-mineral supplement.

Upgeya Pew wrote:I like Life Extension Foundation (www.lef.org).  High quality, backed by research, tremendous source of information.  They have a multi-vitamin, multi-mineral supplement.

this site looks interesting... thanks for the link

Are the rules that different in the USA?  

Not at all.
No GMO allowed in any organic foods.
If you feed GMO grains to cows/chickens (even in trace amounts) you may not sell their meat, nor milk/eggs as organic.

Thought so thanks John .
So Tony I am curious as to why you think that you need to take pills ?

I was reading a homesteading blog where the author, despite feeding her children mineral rich homegrown food, kept having them get cavities. Come to find out, it was largely because they were drinking filtered rain water, which was pretty much void of minerals (Here's the article: http://homestead-honey.com/2014/07/21/making-homemade-toothpaste/). In the comments, she said that she's been supplementing their water with ConcerTrace minerals. They are supposedly extracted from the minerals in Salt Lake (with 99% of the salt removed).

One could also use Redmond Real Salt, which is also from the Salt Lake or other rock salts, such as Himalayan Salt (I get mine in bulk through Salt Works, but you can find himalayan rock salt in many, many stores). Other rock salts that I've encountered are Bolivian Rose and Peruvian Pink. Of course, the salts probably aren't as concentrated as something like ConcernTrace, and you'd need to use a lot of salt to get the minerals.

Both the supplements and salts seem like a pretty natural way to get trace minerals, though I have no idea if there are enough of each trace mineral that your body needs.

Would it not be easier and far far cheaper just to use sea salt for your cooking/ table needs. After all rock salt is basically dried sea bed
The thing about trace elements is you only need a little.
David

In my experience, regardless of how good your diet is, in the modern world full of pollutants and stress there is, in most cases, a need for supplementation.

Check our Andrew Saul's work (google him.....loads of info).

Vitamin C is a miracle tool. Good for everything, bad for nothing. Start here (again look at Andrew's work or that of "Klenner").

Zinc and B group vitamins, especially niacin, are next on my must have list. Followed by E, and fish oil.

They, IMO, are the essentials. Everything else is a bonus or has a particular use/need. Again IMO/experience only....been taking them since I was born due to my father, so I dont know any different.....then I dont know what chronic illness is like either.....or antibiotics

Find a doctor that is on board with this and get some advice

There is a free summit on natural supplements at http://medicinalsupplementsummit.com
Its from the 12th to the 19th of this month. I'm sure there will be a gold mine of information in that summit regarding supplements and how to safely take them, find legit ones, what they do.. Etc

I have to take 600mg of good magnesium supplement (NOT oxide or gluconate) in order not to have or to stop migraine. I usually take glycinate form, although I did take liquid magnesium chloride and it knocked out a migraine at 600 mg (but not at 400, which I hoped would have been enough) dose, however it made my intestines rumble and be unhappy for a while. Glycinate doesn't do it. Now does it mean, that my migraines are because of magnesium deficiency or magnesium relaxed muscles and blood vessels and takes the pain away this way? Who knows. But it works. Getting that much from food is not easy. Especially, if one's digestive system is not working very good to begin with. I hope one day to be able to grow all of my food in the richly built up soil, but for now I juts have small plot and I do eat greens from it, but not as much I would need to consume to get enough.
 Even if one can afford all organic food, it is usually not grown in a rich built up soil anyway. A note about nuts, grains and other seeds-yes they have minerals, however they also have a naturally occurring phytic acid (some more and some less), which pulls minerals and binds them for the seed to grow, so we will not get much if any. Ancient cultures used fermenting, soaking, and other methods to reduce that acid. Check out Weston Price foundation for more information on that. So greens seem to be a better choice to get one's minerals. They experimented with feeding children high mineral/vitamin diet with two groups -one got a bit of white rice, and the other -brown. Children who ate brown, actually had less teeth remineralization than the ones that ate white. Of course, white rice is just calories, but it didn't pull nutrients from other foods in the same meal.
 So just having nutrients in foods is not enough, they have to be absorbed to be used by our bodies.

Joy Oasis wrote:I A note about nuts, grains and other seeds-yes they have minerals, however they also have a naturally occurring phytic acid (some more and some less), which pulls minerals and binds them for the seed to grow, so we will not get much if any.

It's enough to make one give up on eating.  

I use DoTerra LifeLongVitality. Apparently they have essential oils, herbs, fatty acids, minerals, and enzymes. I'm told that the combination of the fatty acids, enzymes, and minerals ups the absorption rate to mid-90%. Of course, that which is absorbed can always be urinated out. That which is never absorbed in typical supplements is still eliminated, but you get no benefit from it. They are not cheap, but I feel like I get what I'm paying for.

Azomite (stands for something like "a-to-z of minerals including trace elements") it is a powder that can be taken as a supplement and provides 70 different trace elements.  Can be used as soil amendment to help rebuild poor soils.

from the wikipedia page- "Azomite is not approved by the FDA for human consumption. Weston A. Price Foundation founder, Sally Fallon, considers Azomite's bioavailable trace mineral content to be a superfood; beneficial to human health."

One of the problems with relying on one single supplement is that minerals such as calcium and magnesium are needed in much greater amounts than you could squeeze into one tablet, so you'd need to supplement those separately.  And as the amount of calcium in the diet varies greatly between different people and they two have to be taken in balance with each other, it's almost impossible to get a cal-mag type tablet which is suitable for more than a minority of the population.  

Also things like iron are needed in vastly different amounts by different people, and the amount that I need, for example, would poison someone like Paul.  

Having said that, I do take a broad spectrum mineral and vitamin supplement, and also a magnesium supplement, and extra iron when needed.  But there is a danger in taking too much because they need to be taken in the correct balance and matched to your needs.

I'm going to lock this thread now as it's becoming a hot-bed for spammers and inflated claims that might or might not be related to the original question and the moderation is turning into behind-the-scenes nightmare.  Maybe we can start more threads about the needs of individual minerals, or the way different people need different ones, and how to balance them all?