Why we take our supplements
June 28, 2019
One of the most common questions we get from people who are on the fence about starting this program is why do they have to take the supplements. Surely they can lose weight without them?
The answer is simple, but scary. Our diet has become so poor that the two in three Australians who are overweight are now malnourished.
You’re probably thinking it’s hard for those two to co-exist, but the truth is the more processed food you eat, the more vitamins you need.
So how did this happen? How did we become so malnourished?
Processed foods, stuffed with high fructose corn syrup, refined flours, and trans fats–are a daily occurrence in most households. Because they are convenient and inexpensive, they often take the place of more nutrient-dense foods.
Your grandparents would have been raised eating foods that contained dramatically higher levels of all vitamins, minerals, and essential fats and the meat they ate would have been much leaner and healthier animals than the ones raised in today’s factory farms. Most store bought meat today is full of chemicals, used to process and preserve.
As well as that, modern agriculture is focused on producing crops maximised not for nutrition, but for size, fast growth rate and resistance to pests. Sadly, this leads to the soil becoming stripped of valuable nutrients, with each crop containing less vitamins and minerals than the one before. In fact, to get the same amount of vitamin A from an orange as our grandparents would have done, we would need to eat eight oranges today.
“One of the largest and most compelling studies on this topic was published in 2004 in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition. Using data from the USDA’s archives, a team of scientists looked at the nutrient content of 43 fruits and vegetables—everything from rutabaga to honeydew—grown in 1950 and compared them to the identical fruits and veggies grown in 1999.
Their findings were disturbing. Levels of calcium were down 16 percent, iron 15 percent, and vitamin C 20 percent. Not a single nutrient had increased in the past 50 years!” (Mark Hyman M.D, 2019).
Because the food we eat today contains fewer nutrients, the servings we consume don’t deliver as much nutrition as they once did. Fewer nutrients means lowered immunity and increased vulnerability to chronic disease and obesity.
“When your body doesn’t get the right nutrition, it just keeps asking for more food. The endless cycle of craving is a Catch-22; people are eating more, getting fatter, but still not feeling satisfied—it’s a nightmare from which they can’t escape.” (Mark Hyman M.D, 2019).
So boys and girls, that is why we drink our Goop and take our vitamins. The supplements we use in our program are absolute top quality and help bridge the gap between the foods we eat and nutritional deficiencies, giving yourself the best chance of good health.
