Week 5: Supplement 101

Naturally after ranting against the modern meme of curing all our ills by taking a pill, I will propose you solve your ills by taking a pill. It seems only logical. 

If you are a Caucasian living in the South who is outside with large amounts of skin exposed for at least an hour each day, and you eat a healthy, varied, non-processed diet, from local sources grown in non-depleted soils, using grass-fed meats and wild fish, and avoiding most vegetable oils, you can just skip this post. 

Still with me? 

Personally I take about 12 pills every morning. I am not going to recommend this many as I am following my doctor's advice by using specific B vitamins to reduce homocysteine levels. This is something you may wish to try with doctor supervision, but much, much later. Gradually changing what you eat is more important. 

This is the multivitamin I take. 

I think that most multivitamins are too dangerous for many. This is because a large percentage of people have a genetic mutation that makes the metabolism of folate problematic. Yes I am a mutant.  I cannot handle folate well. To make matters even worse, most vitamin preparations do not even use folate, they use folic acid, an artificial compound. Can my body use folic acid to make the methylated folate that is in the multivitamin I take? No one seems to know how efficient someone with my genetics would be in converting folic acid to methylated folate. 

So if you want to take a multivitamin, you either need to get yourself genetically tested, or use a multivitamin that helps you by supplying methylated folate instead of folic acid. Personally I do not want the unmetabolized folic acid to build up until my body can excrete it. 

If you have had your physical, I hope you got your vitamin D levels tested. Otherwise you have no idea if you need to supplement or not. Go get it tested before using vitamin D as it can be toxic. No, two pills is not necessarily better than one. The vitamin D in your multivitamin will not be enough to hurt you, but it might not be enough to help you either. Here is what I take.

If you live above the red line, you may need Vitamin DI may be wrong, but if I had to pick one reason why I got cancer it would be Vitamin D deficiency. Right now, even with a very aggressive supplementation program, I am still deficient. At the start of the supplementation I was low enough that I almost certainly had undiagnosed bone problems. It does not matter how much calcium is in your diet, if you do not have enough Vitamin D, the calcium is not properly utilized. 

The video I am recommending today talks about this issue. One figure in the video I found shocking. 85% of patients admitted to a Boston Hospital for any reason were deficient in Vitamin D. 

Unless you live an active outdoor life in an area without winter, you need to consider supplementation. The Vitamin D test should be a part of any physical you take. 

If you take vitamin D there is another vitamin you need to take--K-2. I do not take K-2 because I eat Natto. I think it tastes fine, like what I remember pork 'n beans used to taste like when I ate that. But the slimy look leaves something to be desired. One reason I eat it is that it has more vitamin K-2 than any other food in the world. There are a few vitamins that are in short supply in our diet. K-2 is one of them. For a more in-depth discussion of this click here. 

This is not the K-2 you are looking for, move on. If you eat fermented cheese like blue cheese, liver, pasture-fed butter and milk, or have good gut bacteria that live on soluble fiber, you might be OK—might. But if you don't, you should supplement. 

(Remember that K-1 is not the same vitamin!) 

K-2 is crucial in calcium allocation. Even if you have enough calcium, without this vitamin, along with vitamin D, the calcium is not laid down in the bones as well. Even worse, the calcium might be put in places you do not want it, like your heart. 

So either crack open the styrofoam Natto container, eat a lot of blue cheese, or get some supplementation. 

Here is what I take if I have not had natto recently. 

Magnesium deficiency is also a problem for many. Magnesium also helps build strong bones. Here is what I take, but I take less than the recommended amount.  

I do not take calcium except for the modest amount in my multivitamin. I have calcium in places I do not want it to be. The sudden rush of calcium supplementation, really the rush you get from any vitamin, is not good. This is one reason I take so many vitamins: I use smaller doses twice a day. With calcium this rush is particularly dangerous. Women seem to be different than men on this as they are more susceptible to bone issues. But even women should space the calcium pills throughout the day. 

Remember what Socrates said, "The unexamined vitamin is not worth taking."