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My Supplements for Nutritional Requirements

If you look on the label of most supplements there's always a column for your recommended daily intake. In Canada it is given as a percentage. As long as you are eating real foods then you do not need to try to reach the RDI through supplemental use. However RDI's are based on the amount required to prevent deficiencies. So for Vitamin D the amount required per day is 400IU, this is to prevent rickets, however Vitamin D has so many more functions (its actually a hormone), if you can get the levels high enough you could possibly prevent 70% of all cancers (and prevent autoimmune disease, you'll get less colds, and so much more), and 400IU won't get you there. So the RDI's may be a little outdated, but I understand that its for safety issues.

But even if you eat whole foods, you may have deficiencies because of the types of foods you eat. So with Vitamin D, if you don't get exposed to UVB radiation (we rarely do) then you won't have high enough levels of Vitamin D. We all consume too much Omega 6 without enough Omega 3, so we should be taking our fish oils (or better, lowering Omega 6). Most people don't eat natto, or goose liver, or liver in general, so we lack Vitamin K2 (natto=MK-7, liver=MK-4) and Vitamin A. By being farmed over and over again with the same crops we are lacking critical minerals such as selenium (prevents cancer) and by filtering our water magnesium is removed (very important mineral:Dietary Magnesium deficiency induces heart rhythm changes, impairs glucose tolerance, and decreases serum cholesterol in post menopausal women).

Also, with Vitamin E there are 8 forms. 4 forms, the tocotrienols are hard to get in the diet but has many many benefits (prevents DNA damage, prevents hair loss, anti-cancer) so we can only get it through supplements (unless you want to use palm oil). And the RDI for Vitamin E is based on only the synthetic alpha-tocopherol which lowers all the other forms of Vitamin E in the body.

If you look in supplement stores there are literally hundreds of brands with hundreds of forms and hundreds of dosages, which ones do we choose!? To make it easier you should just order online and there are only certain products that I use because these companies have provided certificates of authenticity (COA) and they are trusted brands. So the products are of high quality and you know for sure what your getting.

Now Foods, Vitamin D-3, 2,000 IU, 240 Softgels (iHerb) - Make sure to check your levels and get it up over 30ng/ml

Vitamin K2 Menatetrenone (from Relentless Improvement) - This has been shown to REVERSE arteriosclerosis in rats (also keeps your skins smooth and teeth clean and strong, it tells the calcium where to go so that it doesn't float around and bind to your arteries causing calcification)

Life Extension, Vitamin K2, Low-Dose, 45 mcg, 90 Softgels (iHerb) - this is required in much lower doses, since the half-life is so long.

Nature's Way, Vitamin A, 10,000 IU, 100 Softgels (iHerb) - Works synergistically with Vitamin K2 and Vitamin D

Source Naturals, Life Minerals, No Iron, 120 Tablets (iHerb) - Has the necessary minerals, selenium, magnesium, and other required ones.

Source Naturals, Coenzymate B Complex, Orange Flavored Sublingual, 60 Tablets (iHerb) - Takes care of your b-complexes which are important co-factors for many processes, also the niacin will raise your HDL levels.

Jarrow Formulas, CarotenALL, Mixed Carotenoid Complex, 60 Softgels (iHerb) - Has a spectrum of carotenoids which are very important cell membrane antioxidants.

Source Naturals, C-1000, 100 Tablets (iHerb) - important to get your Vitamin C especially if you eat a lot of carbohydrates. Time-released is better since Vitamin C has a short half-life.

Natural Factors, RxOmega-3 Factors Pharmaceutical Grade, 120 Softgels (iHerb) - best fish oil product I have seen. Very very high quality.

So by splitting up all the components you get everything for a cheaper price but higher quality. Also you can take some things that you probably don't need everyday.

The Vitamin A, Vitamin D, Vitamin K2 and Fish Oil are must for everyday use. However everything else should be cycled.

By cycled I mean take it for 3 days, then skip 2 days. Or take it every other day. Or just take it everyday for 1 week, then skip 1 week.

The vitamin C however should not be taken around exercises. Probably 3 hours before or after to keep it safe. Since Vitamin C may interfere with the benefits of exercise.

The reason for cycling is two-fold. First you don't want your body to get use to this constant supply of nutrients, and also you probably don't need to take it everyday as long as you eat real food, so you keep your body guessing and it never gets used to it, ensuring long-term benefits. Second, it makes it way cheaper. Do you know why the multi-vitamins you buy are so cheap, mostly because they're crap. These are all high quality products.

Now, what should be taken apart? I'd keep the Vitamin C away from the mineral complex. So the Vitamin C should be taken in the morning, mineral complex at night. I would also take the B-complex in the morning as it does provide some energy.

Vitamin D should be taken at around noon, so it doesn't interfere with sleep. Because Vitamin D is the sun hormone.

There is also another part to my supplement program which is the healthy lifestyle part. This is stuff like green tea extract, certain herbal extracts, antioxidants, etc.. I'll go over in a future post.

Note: you can get a 5 dollar discount if you are a first time buyer using the code on my right panel, it is TUF454. It's a rewards program, which you can also use with your friends and family by signing up for it.

Update: I also forgot the all important Magnesium. We're supposed to get magnesium from the water, but since our water is so "clean" we need it from other sources, and this is a very important mineral that probably most of us are deficient in.

Source Naturals, Magnesium Malate, 1250 mg, 180 Tablets (iHerb)

Supplements

I have been meaning to write about my supplement regimen for a long time now, but I have never gotten to it because its a controversial issue. Many of my friends take multi-vitamins thinking that it will make up for any deficiencies they may have, or maybe because they think that the more nutrients they get the better, or because their doctor told them too. The brand I most commonly see is the Centrum A to Z multivitamin and the One-A-Day multivitamin. I have looked at all the multi-vitamins you can find in stores, and they all have major major problems. You should not be taking the ones found at your supermarket, none of them are well-forumulated enough to be good for you, if anything they are a major detriment to your health and life-long potential.

Here is a great article about the vitamins people commonly consume, Health Journal: The Case Against Vitamins

But doctors say many patients view vitamins as a quick fix to compensate for poor eating habits, and resist any suggestion that taking them may not be beneficial. "A lot of people are passionate about their vitamins," says Dr. Miller of the National Institute on Aging. "I don't know where they get it from, but it's not based on scientific evidence."

This is so true. These nutritional companies are here to make money, just like pharmaceutical companies. So guess what they put in the vitamins. They put in the cheapest stuff they can get yet make sure they cover the letters A to Z so that the consumer can be sure they are getting "everything" because we want "everything."

Well to determine what we "should" be taking, we have to base it again on scientific evidence.

Disclaimer: Supplements cannot replace proper nutrition and exercise, they are additions to a healthy lifestyle.

Lets look at Centrum:

Vitamin A 1000IU
Beta-Carotene 3000IU
Vitamin E 25IU
Vitamin C 90mg
Folic Acid 0.4mg
Vitamin B1 2.25mg
Vitamin B2 3.2mg
Niacin 15mg
Vitamin B6 3mg
Vitamin B12 14mcg
Vitamin D 400IU
Biotin 45mcg
Pantothenic Acid 10mg

Calcium 175mg
Phosphorus 125mg
Iodine 0.15mg
Iron 10mg
Magnesiume 50mg
Copper 2mg

Lutein 250mcg

People will look at this list and go: this is very good. Well its not.

First, the beta-carotene is probably synthetic and only contains one form when in nature its usually mixed.

Second, it has iron in it. Well men, if you want to die earlier then go ahead and take it. Men have no way to get rid of iron, and for those that eat meat, we accumulate it. Iron reacts with oxygen to cause free radicals which cause damage.

Third, the Vitamin E. I'm willing to bet its the synthetic alpha-tocopherol and if you look at the bottle it is. There are eight forms of Vitamin E and when you find a multi-vitamin with all 8 forms its usually good. The synthetic form is known to deplete the other forms in your body, so Vitamin E from this isn't doing you much good.

Fourth, the Vitamin C is way too low. They just stuck that in there because they needed C.

Fifth, the Vitamin D is way too low. I take 5000 IU to achieve proper blood levels. The 400IU is to prevent Rickets, not for optimal health.

Sixth, the Niacin is probably Niacinamide (it is) and Niacinamide might decrease your life span.

Seventh, all the minerals are in forms that are poorly absorbed so they pass right through you into the toilet, and its also missing selenium which we probably need because our soils are depleted.

Eighth, many of the B vitamins amounts are too low, just there to look good.

Ninth, not many people know this but when you combine copper and Vitamin C you get LOTS of free radicals, enough to damage the B12 you consume. Making it useless and dangerous. So you'd have to separate the multivitamin from the multimineral.

Tenth, why they throw in the lutein?

Eleventh, why no Vitamin K2?

There are probably lots of more problems just as what type of filler they use for the pill and a lot more stuff they are missing. As you can see these multivitamins are doing you more harm then good, and their just wasting your hard-earned money.

I have created a supplemental regimen with the help of the ingenious people at the Immortality Institute who are dedicated to extending their life and being healthy.

I will go over what I take on the next post. In the meantime ditch the pills. (Usually people don't take that too well because they've been taking their pills everyday religiously thinking its good for them but then I come along and tell them its not, they're not too happy.)

Note: a great formulation can be found at AOR. They make their vitamins based on science and they have very high quality supplements and components, thus the very high prices.

However, I have been able to cobble together products that are cheapter then the AOR Ortho Core and probably better because you can keep components apart, and take the different components when you want to or need to.

I have no ties to AOR. I just like their multivitamin.

Why is my advice so different?

The New York Times has a good article on health, "Alcohol's Good For You? Some Scientists Doubt It." I doubt it too. It basically outlines the problem with the evidence utilized for the recommendation that moderate drinking is good for you:

“The moderate drinkers tend to do everything right — they exercise, they don’t smoke, they eat right and they drink moderately,” said Kaye Middleton Fillmore, a retired sociologist from the University of California, San Francisco, who has criticized the research. “It’s very hard to disentangle all of that, and that’s a real problem.”

Exactly! This is a criticism of epidemiological studies. What are epidemiological studies?

Well they take a bunch of factors from a huge number of people, usually through self-surveys which aren't very accurate either, then they do some mathematics and determines what factor causes X (X being diseases, conditions, other factors, such as obesity, height, risk of heart disease, etc...).

But as you can see, in the article, those who drink moderate amounts also exercise, don't smoke, eat "right" blah blah blah. Once the idea that moderate drinking is healthy is put out into the public, healthy people adopt this and when studies are done, healthy people are drinking moderately.

Let's take vegetarianism as another example. In my opinion, vegetarianism isn't the healthiest (but if you supplement the necessary nutrients then maybe it could be healthy), but I remember a study stating that those with higher IQs are more likely to be vegetarian. Well guess what, people with higher "IQs" tend to read more. So there's usually more articles stating that vegetarians are healthier so when the higher IQs read they see "vegetarianism is the healthiest."

I can't remember where I read this example but let's say they do a study with runners. Now if the cultural paradigm was one that exercise is good for you and the study finds that runners are healthier all is good. But if the cultural paradigm is that exercise is bad for you, but they find that runners are healthier, they can easily manipulate the data such that they find that the runners are healthier because they drink more water.

This is the state of modern health recommendations. They are based on epidemiological studies, and epidemiological studies cannot show you what is causing people to be healthy, they can just tell you what healthy people do without any specifics. A study could probably find that "healthy" people wear running shoes more often, but does that mean running shoes make you healthy? (I don't believe in running shoes, more on that later).

So is my advice the best? I do not know, but I see the results in myself and my friends, whether the beneficial effects are long term, I do not know, because there are no long-term studies.

Is alcohol good for us? I do not know that either, because there are no controlled trials. In the meantime, I would keep the intake below the level of which you notice a considerable effect, because we do know alcohol damages the liver and the brain.

Edit: great post about the failure of epidemiology because of the homogeneity of our lifestyles, A Little Tidbit

Eat Your Fiber?

I never fail to hear this statement (without the question mark) in popular health articles, nutrition seminars, and from the mouths of my friends and families. I would ask them why, and they would give the usual spiel in a tone that makes them seem like experts. I remember one person giving me a 10 minute lecture on it:

"Well if you eat a lot of animal products without fiber then the animal material will just sit in your intestines. Since these animal products have carcinogens and other toxins in them, by letting them sit inside of you, they have a much greater likelihood of interacting with your cells, thus causing cancer...blah....blah...blah"

NB: This is also the argument used for drinking at least 8 glasses of water (which is bullshit too).

So should we be consuming fiber? If you read all the studies most of them are epidemiological in nature. The problems with epidemiological studies have been covered in depth all over the internet so go look for it yourself.  So instead of epidemiology I like to look at interventional studies.

Interventional studies put people into two groups, one that acts as the control and the other that gets the intervention. This is a much better comparison, then giving out surveys, then using a bunch of complex maths to determine any relationship that might be there. The more math you do on the data, the farther from reality the data gets.

So looking at studies, I came upon this one:

Lack of effect of a low-fat, high-fiber diet on the recurrence of colorectal adenomas. Polyp Prevention Trial Study Group.

2079 men and women who were 35 years of age or older and who had had one or more histologically confirmed colorectal adenomas removed...high in fiber (18 g of dietary fiber per 1000 kcal) and fruits and vegetables (3.5 servings per 1000 kcal)... they remained in the study for approximately four years...39.7 percent and 39.5 percent, respectively, had at least one recurrent adenoma; ... CONCLUSIONS: Adopting a diet that is low in fat and high in fiber, fruits, and vegetables does not influence the risk of recurrence of colorectal adenomas.

As you can see from the conclusion, fiber did not prevent adenomas from forming again!

In my opinion, fiber is bad for you, and I can personally state that you do not need fiber to be regular. If anything fiber causes more problems than it solves.

Do you ever notice, that the more fiber you get, the more gassy you are?

Since fiber cannot be broken down by the human body, the fiber travels all the way to the large intestines where the bacteria present there can break down the fiber as an energy source and produce gas. Now I do not know whether its a good thing that these bacteria are getting food when they shouldn't be, but I'd rather not feed them, because I doubt our ancestors ate as much fiber as our health institutions recommend.

Why 5 servings per day. I'd keep it down to 1 serving of fruit and vegetables per day or less. More about that on the next post.

Amazing Physical Abilities

Just wanted to post some videos of people with some amazing physical abilities. Just blows my mind.







and of course one of Usain Bolt

Conventional Wisdom

We live in a society where everybody is told to eat more of this (fruits and vegetables) and less of that (meat, fat), we are told to eat less salt, get lots of exercise, take some multivitamins, put on lots of sunscreen all the time.

I came across an interesting article the other day, "Do National Dietary Guidelines Do More Harm Than Good." I would argue yes and no. Yes in the sense that the dietary guidelines are wrong, but no in the sense that it gives society a guideline to follow.  Now I do not know the complexities of how our government and economy are running, so I do not know what would happen to society if every single individual abandoned grains and started to consume more animal products but I can tell you that the individual will get healthier.

In the article (and also this one, Dietary Guidelines May Have Downsides) the article discusses how telling people to eat lower fat has made people think that consuming more carbohydrates is ok. If you read some of my posts you will know that this free reign of choice among carbohydrates probably causes a lot of the problems today, since where there are carbohydrates in processed foods, you also find omega 6 and vegetable oils.

You know we are all told to consume less salt (I sure don't, I love salt) to keep our blood pressure down (my blood pressure is 110/70) but there have been many studies casting doubts on whether high salt intake is actually bad for you.

Do you like to put on sunscreen? Why? To protect yourself from skin cancer right. If you do use suncreen make sure to get the kind that protects from both UVA and UVB. But what is weird is that melanoma is always found in places that are not exposed to sun. Could this cancer be due to a lack of vitamin D production? This paper, "Do Sunscreens Increase the Risk of Melanoma in Populations Residing at Higher Latitudes" seems to suggest so. Richard at Free The Animal has a great post about it. Barry Groves also covers this topic in depth.

I've come to believe over the years that so called "conventional wisdom" is usually wrong. This applies to health, relationships, finance, and education. When I have kids I hope to instill in them a sense of curiosity that leads to questions about everything, including authority.

Other questions that should be looked at is: Do we really need fluoride toothpaste and water? Do we really need to wash our hair everyday, how bout our face? Do we really need padded shoes that support our arches and heals? What is the correct posture? Is it with the chest up? I'll answer these questions soon, I can tell you one thing "correct" natural posture has made a noticeable difference in my life.

Medical school application are opening. Wish me luck. But I'm pretty sure I'll get in this time :)