TYLER TOLMAN BLOG
Supplements | Beneficial or Harmful for Your Health?
Supplements | Beneficial or Harmful for Your Health?
Let’s have a conversation about supplements.
First of all, the word supplement means “taken away from”.
So what you really want to be doing is complementing your lifestyle and diet, not supplementing it.
Do Supplements Heal or Harm?
In some interesting research from Cornell University and the University of Southern California, they are starting to discover that when we take a supplement, there’s something called “nutrient upon nutrient interaction”.
And what that actually means is if I take a concentrated form of, for example calcium, that concentrated form of calcium (in the form of a supplement as opposed to calcium from a whole food source) actually diminishes iron within the body. This is why a lot of people who start taking calcium will become anemic and deficient in iron. So then they’ll start taking an iron supplement, but the problem with that is that when you take an iron supplement it becomes oxidative stress within the body.
This in turn can lead to other deficiencies like B-Vitamin… so can you see now that whenever we’re supplementing we’re actually throwing the system out of whack!
Now if you have a major B-12 deficiency, then maybe having some form of supplementation just to rebuild that deficiency is okay – for now. But what you really need to do for long term health is find where B-12 occurs in nature.
But can we really get everything we need from whole foods?
So where can you get iron from in nature? Where can we get calcium from in nature?
A great whole food example is greens. Greens are full of calcium and iron. They also contain B-Vitamins, Vitamin C, enzymes and co-factors that have even been discovered. So what I like to do is always bring it back to making sure we have quality digestion and getting our nutrition the way that Mother Nature intended.
What About the 'Supplements' I Sell?
Now a lot of people come to me and they say, “Hey Tyler, well, you sell supplements on your website, things like your Greens and Unicorn Dust (Berry Blend).”
Well there’s a distinction between a supplement and an actual whole food complement. You can dry out a date and it’s still a whole food. You can dry out alfalfa sprouts, grind them up and put them in your water. They still have the entire nutritional profile they originally had just without the water.
So there’s a big difference between that and a supplement where they are getting rid of all other nutrients and just concentrating pure B-12 or pure iron.
And research is now showing that any time we’re highly processing a food, like sugar, it’s probably not good for you.
So when I sell Greens on my website, what I’m actually selling is pure alfalfa, wheatgrass and barley grass that’s just been dried. It’s organically and locally grown and it’s put together with minimal processing so when you put it into your body, you still have access to all the co-factors, enzymes and nutrients of that complete whole food.
When you go to a health food store and you buy maca powder, that’s the actual maca root. When you buy raw cacao, that’s the actual bean of the cacao tree. These are still whole foods. And these whole foods have a variety of enzymes, antioxidants, nutrients, vitamins and minerals. It’s a complete form that the body recognizes because it’s coming from nature.
So we need to keep it simple and bring it back to Mother Nature because Mother Nature really does know best. Mother Nature is complex so that we don’t have to be. What I mean by that, is when we consume things in their whole food form with minimal processing, our body figures it out.
Supplements vs the Whole Food
Today, science will be done on a spinach leaf that has 2600 different chemical phytonutrients that all have a profound effect on the body. But in the studies of the spinach leaf, they’ll find maybe one ingredient that targets the reduction of cancer in the body. Supplement companies will use that study and extract that one little tiny nutrient and then sell it as a pill or a capsule and a supplement. Then when studies are done on the supplement, they’ll find it doesn’t actually work.
One of these studies was done specifically on Vitamin A. When you eat a carrot it contains something called carotenes and beta-carotenes along with lots of other nutrients. When you eat the carrot, the beta-carotenes are converted into Vitamin A which enhances eyesight and reduces the risk of cancer. It can also reverse cancer in the body.
Amazing!!
So companies take that information, they take just beta-carotene, they put it in a pill, they sell it to you and they use the original study that was done on carrots. And you believe by taking that pill you’re actually gonna prevent cancer and improve your eyesight, which is not the case.
Cornell University has done studies of Vitamin A supplements and beta-carotene supplements and found that they actually cause faster mortality, which means those supplements actually kill you faster.
So once we really look at the science and use basic intelligence, we can easily come to the conclusion that whole foods are ALWAYS the way to go.
I could go off for hourS talking about all the different supposed supplements like Vitamin D and even B-Vitamins. In fact, new research just came out about B-Vitamin supplements and their implication in causing lung cancer.
This is not the case with B-Vitamins inside of whole foods.
It’s time we get back to eating the banana. It’s time we get back to eating the cucumber and the spinach. Every product that I sell or promote is an actual whole food item. So I recommend checking it out, looking into it for yourself and bringing it back to simplicity… bringing it back to nature.
Thanks for reading!
