Hello, you guys. Welcome to this week’s Wellness Wednesday. Today, I wanted to talk a little bit about supplementation. In the last couple of weeks, I’ve had a lot of people asking me about what kind of supplements they should be taking, if they should be taking supplements, what kind of brands, what supplements in general to be taking, just all supplements. So one of the big things I like to address first is why supplements are important. I know a lot of people say, “I eat good Whole Foods. I don’t need supplements,” and in theory, that’s a great thought. In a perfect world, if we were to eat all of our fruits, vegetables, all of our food groups, we wouldn’t need to supplement our bodies with extra nutrients.
Unfortunately, if you’re living in the United States, we’re not typically getting all of our nutrients out of the foods that we’re eating. What’s typically estimated is that in order to get the nutrients that you need from the food that you’re eating, you need that food to be grown in soil that’s rich with at least 54-ish trace minerals. And unfortunately in the US, most of our soil has about four, which means that although you can be doing everything right, even if you’re growing your own food in your own garden, unfortunately your soil probably doesn’t have enough nutrients in it to be getting you all of those trace minerals, to be getting you all of the nutrients that your body truly needs, which is why supplementing can be really important. And so that in general is one thing to be looking at when it comes to supplementation.
So if you’re kind of unsure where you should be starting when it comes to supplementation, the easiest thing to do is to check with a blood test. You can be checking your vitamin B levels, you can be checking your vitamin D levels, things like that, or you can look at your general symptoms, what kind of foods do you eat, that sort of thing. The average person, especially in Minnesota, is usually going to be deficient in vitamin D just because even if you are outside, we’re typically not getting enough of that vitamin D in. And when you’re looking at supplementing, it’s making sure that you’re getting the bio-available form of that supplement. So what I mean by that is say, vitamin D, for example, we need to make sure that we’re getting vitamin D3, because vitamin D3 is the bio-available form of vitamin D that our body can actually utilize once it’s consumed.
There’s a lot of different forms of vitamin D that we can actually purchase, but those aren’t necessarily readily available to utilize in our body. So yeah, you can purchase this supplement that says vitamin D2, or vitamin D without any specification, but we don’t know if our body’s going to actually be able to utilize what you’re putting in your body. So it’s not necessarily doing you any good. It’s not necessarily doing you any bad, but we don’t know what you’re actually getting out of that supplement. So the first thing is making sure that you’re getting a supplement that’s in the proper form for our body to absorb.
Another important thing that I like to talk to people about is getting a supplement that’s from a pure source. And I know a lot of people were like, “Well, I don’t know where to get that.” So a good rule of thumb is that if you can buy it from a box store like Walgreens or Target, it’s probably not going to be the best option. Not that I don’t love those places, but what happens is they’re going to usually have a higher profit margin for supplements that are sold in places like that. And in order to create a profit margin, you have to be able to undercut what is actually in that product. And an easy way to do that is by kind of misleading what’s in the product. So in organic chemistry terms, that means we look at an antimeres and more of a layman’s term of that, it means that we have two mirror images of the same thing.
And when I talk about going back to the whole idea of a bio-available form or a readily available form of a supplement that can be used in the body, that’s where this is really important. So say we’re creating or synthesizing a supplement, again, we can go back to vitamin D3. If we’re creating that, we have two forms that are created. We have the active form, and then we have a mirror image of it. And the mirror image is going to look just like it but it’s not going to be active. Unfortunately, it’s kind of expensive to pull this non-active mirror image form out. So a lot of companies say, “Screw it. We’re going to keep that in there,” and then they sell that. But because it technically looks alike, looks identical because it’s a mirror image, they can say, “This is 600 milligrams or IUs,” or whatever the unit is of the supplement in there. When really, it’s only 300 of that supplement in there that your body can actually use, but it looks like it’s 600.
And so that’s something to be aware of as well, because you think that you’re getting a certain amount, but you’re not. Another thing to be looking at beyond that is when you’re looking at picking up a supplement from a store like that, there’s something called [sundusting 00:06:37], which sounds a little bit different. But the FDA allows certain supplements or certain companies to say, “Hey, we have X amount of the supplement in here,” when it’s only a certain percentage of that supplement in there and the rest is fillers. And one thing that we’ve actually found out is that those fillers can cause mold in the body.
So if you do a test where you have three glasses of water and you have an apple slice in each glass and you have one apple slice with nothing in it, as you can expect that apple slice is going to turn brown. It’s going to oxidize. It’s going to do what you would expect it to do. If you have an apple slice in that water with an unpure supplement so like something that you would just get off the shelf at a big box store, it’s actually going to mold because that’s those fillers in there and that’s what happens in our bodies. If you have that apple slice in water with a peer supplement, it actually tends to stay much whiter, much crisper for a lot longer because it’s actually doing what it’s supposed to do. So that’s kind of a real life experiment of why you want to get a supplement that’s more pure.
So I know that this is a very, very brief intro on supplements and the importance of them, and I could deep dive into this forever as I’m sure many people could, but the biggest thing is looking at getting pure supplements. So there’s a lot of different sources that you can get them from. I put my link on here for where I get mine from. If you got a chiropractor, I’m sure that they can help you get yours from their pure sites where you can actually get a purity assay, that list, the purity content of the supplement because that’s the most ideal way to get it. But if you have questions, reach out to me because I can deep dive forever but for the sake of the length of this video, I’m not going to do that. But I hope this information was at least helpful in making you think about what you’re putting in your body and why it’s important to think about that. So I’ll catch you guys next week. Bye.