Eat Your Apples Not Your Pills

Have you ever been out to a restaurant and witnessed a person pulling a kayak sized pill box out and taking more vitamins than food is on the table, or is this you? While eating poorly and subsidizing your diet with vitamins may be an easy diet option, it is not a wise one. Throw the pills away and pick up an apple.

There are a lot of things wrong with vitamins. Aside from the obvious fact that you as a consumer have no way of knowing how long those pills have been on the shelf, or for that matter how long the ingredients in the pills sat before they got inserted into capsules and sent to the grocery. But also take into consideration how much trust you are putting into a label. There are a lot of big words on there, do you know what they are? Ninety percent of most dietary supplements are made of filler. And that filler can range to any number of mysterious albeit digestible materials. But just because the FDA and our friendly supplement manufactures say it’s okay to ingest it doesn’t mean that you should.

The ingredients that people flock towards supplements for, are found in food. Food that is found in your grocery store. In the produce section, the whole meats section (not chicken strips or nuggets, real honest to goodness chicken, beef, fish, pork etc), and the whole dairy section (milk, cream ,cheese), and the whole grains located in the bulk sections of most markets (oats, nuts and legumes). We as humans have evolved along with every other living organisms on this planet to suit our environment. We evolved with our food sources and unless you ate a radioactive Cheesy Poof, I don’t think the chip/cookie isle, the boxes and prepared food isle, or the frozen dinner isle is going to provide the substance your body need to carry out normal daily metabolic functions.  

These very real, very normal foods have all the vitamins and minerals a person needs. If you eat them, veggies first, then fruits, followed by legumes and meats, then dairy and breads. Daily at every meal you will be taking in Vitamin A, B, C, D, K as well as Chromium, Copper, Fluorine, Manganese, Selenium Zinc, and Iron. And not only will you be taking them in, but they come prepared by nature in packages that allow for optimum absorption and complimentary pairing, ie your body will know what to do with it.  

Vitamins and minerals are good, in fact your body needs them to function. So do yourself a favor and eat them in a way they can be used. Eating an apple a day really does keep the doctor away.