Supplements first started to become popular last century, and they were a way of adding things to the diet to prevent popular diseases caused by nutritional deficiencies – like scurvy (lack of vitamin C) and rickets (lack of vitamin D). Now, taking a supplement doesn’t just mean popping a pill but equally, you can get your vitamins, minerals, herbs, essential oils and enzymes as a drink (think vitamin water), powder to make into a shake or even a spray.
It’s big business. £1.5billion is spent each year in the UK alone and a hundred times that globally. Two-thirds of us take a supplement, and the market is predicted to grow by nearly 9% this year alone [source for statistics: IBIS World]. Are you one of them?
Who needs supplements?
It’s often said that people who eat a ‘balanced’ diet shouldn’t need to supplement. They should be able to get everything they need from the food they eat. But is that really the case? Would your body feel better if you had a few supplements inside you or is it really just expensive urine?
My view is this: so many people I see are eating a sub-standard diet when we meet, not eating their 7 fruit and veggies a day, choosing poor-quality sources of protein, and relying more often than they’d like on convenience foods.
If your body is out of balance (there is something not quite working in your health), that one-size-fits-all approach is unlikely to be sufficient. When your body is dealing with certain health conditions, it often means that something is missing or needed in far greater amounts than you’re currently getting.
Take stress as an example. When you are under stress, your body really motors through vitamins B and C, and magnesium so the regular ‘daily amount’ – while it might be sufficient for the bloke down the road – is not going to meet your personal requirements.
Medications, smoking, alcohol, and caffeine further deplete the body with essential nutrients.
Now let’s think about what you eat. Soil quality today is not what it was, making it harder to get the nutrients from the foods you eat. Today’s soils are often depleted of minerals. A study was done in 2003found that the fruit and veg you eat today contain 20% fewer minerals than in the 1930s. And some (zinc and calcium) contain 50% fewer.
Also, consider the impact of food miles. Long-distance transportation of foods depletes the nutrient content and so does the processing. As soon as you start adding preservatives to food to prolong its life, you decrease the nutrient quality.
Supplements without fillers and binders
If you’re already taking supplements, you may have noticed that some supplements contain things other than active ingredients. Let’s say you want a magnesium supplement. You look on the back of the packaging to find that, aside from the expected magnesium, there are a host of other ingredients you were not expecting.
These other ingredients have to be listed by law and they are the ‘fillers (or bulking agents) and binders’.
So, what’s going on?
The amount you need of the active ingredient is often very small. There’s a reason supplement are also known as ‘micronutrients’… The dose you need might be physically so small that it needs something else with it in the capsule to fill the rest of the space inside the capsule. A filler. Common fillers include calcium, lactose, rice flour, salt and sugar.
The binders are those ingredients that bind the active ingredients together when they’re compressed into tablet form. Cellulose is common.
Tablets are usually the cheapest way to take supplements, but they do tend to be heavier on the fillers and binders plus a host of other ‘excipients’ that coat the tablets and make them easier to pass along the manufacturing line without clogging the machines up. Like stearic acid, and magnesium stearate or silicate.
Cheaper high street brands will tend to rely more heavily on these excipients and may also throw in artificial colours and flavours, too, to help their product along.
Supplement testing with kinesiology or bioresonance
Life these days is at such a fast pace, it’s no wonder we suffer from stress, poor digestion, stomach pains, headaches, tiredness and outright exhaustion. There are many supplements we can take to support our diet but they can vary enormously in quality and price. Working out which ones are the best for us can be a minefield. Kinesiology can help.
With kinesiology or bioresonance, we can balance the body systems and biochemical processes affected by stress so the systems will take up what they need again. In addition, we can test to see which supplements your body needs, how many to take, the best time to take them and for how long. Using my knowledge and experience in nutrition, I will help you prioritise what you need so you don’t feel like you are a rattling pill bottle!
If you are already taking supplements I recommend that you bring them with you to the appointment to confirm they are the best supplements for you. If you are concerned about bias then the supplements can be disguised so that neither I nor you will know which is being tested! I can also show you how to test yourself so that you can see if something is good for you or not before buying it.
Allergy testing
As well as checking for supplements, kinesiology can also be used to test for allergies to common foodstuffs, household chemicals, pollen, house and dust mites and much more. My testing kit has many different items but you are welcome to bring any products which may be of concern to you. Don’t worry, you are not expected to bring the entire contents of your kitchen or bathroom cupboard!
Find out more
There are many food allergies and food intolerances as well as environmental allergies and intolerances. Thanks to our help, all your intolerances can disappear, and all your allergies can be reduced if we support you on a journey to detox and repair your gut and increase the oxygenation of your body.
Read more about our allergy and intolerance testing here and book a free 20-minute telephone consultation on this link.
