Subj: Fwd: NUTRITIONAL SUPPLEMENTS: A Basic Daily Regime

Date: 96-12-15 22:13:31 EST

From: Abbeygreen

To: Miltgreen

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Forwarded Message:

Subj: NUTRITIONAL SUPPLEMENTS: A Basic Daily Regime

Date: 96-12-02 16:54:23 EST

From: MINWHIT

To: CWillis105, TontonWInk, BLUEUKATS, IKreis

To: JMMacauley, MFarbstein, JBenkov, Algaphile

To: Abbeygreen, gourdet@cris.com, RoyMottram, SBGA01

To: Skalverson

This is a reprint from an article by Dr. Bruce Wapen. Dr. Wapen is a medical doctor, naturopathic doctor, and board certified emergency physician. Any typos are mine, not the doctor's. :-) You may want to print this as it is kind of long. This is for your info only - DO NOT USE IT FOR MARKETING. Thanks.

NUTRITIONAL SUPPLEMENTS: A Basic Daily Regime

Certain nutrients must be taken on a daily basis to promote optimal health. It is extremely difficult to acheive this through diet alone. This is because few of us eat healthy all the time, and even if we try to, the food we can buy in this country does not contain adequate amounts of micronutrients (vitamins, minerals, enzymes). Farmers get paid for the quantity, not the nutrient quality, of their produce. Modern farming technique is predicated on using nutrient deficient fertilizer to force-grow crops from the same spent soil year after year, or sometimes, several times per year. Buying "organic" won't solve this problem. "Organic" means no hormones or pesticides, but it does not address the nutritional content of the food product.

Current research is convincingly linking disease to poor nutrition. Most of us get too much in the way of macronutrients (proteins, fats, & carbohydrates), but the degenerative diseases that are killing us prosper because we are starving to death for lack of micronutrients. Cardio-vascular disease, adult onset diabetes, and arthritis can all be prevented, improved, and sometimes cured by appropriate nutritional intervention. And if you see cancer as a failure of the immune system to do its job for lack of essential building blocks, then it too is a consequence of poor nutrition.

Even if you eat well, but especially if you eat junk, you will benefit by supplementing your diet with certain key micronutrients. Following is a brief descussion of the four (4) items I consider most important.

VITAMIN C: Linus Pauling, the most brilliant chemist of the century, proselytized the benefits of taking high doses of this vitamin. Humans are one of the few animals on the planet that don't make this vitamin. If we don't eat it, we'll eventually die of scurvy; yet it only takes two (2) milligrams a day to prevent that awful ailment. Pauling, however, contends that we would promote optimal health by taking in an amount similar to that which we would make if we could make it. Other animals of our size make about 10,000 milligrams a day, and that, says Pauling, would be a good dose. (He personally took about 18,000 mg/day until he passed away a few years back at the age of 93). Vitamin C is ascorbate. The usual form is ascorbic acid (hydrogen ascorbate), but it is also available as calcium ascorbate and potassium ascorbate.

Dose: 10,000 mg/day for adults and 1000 mg/ay per year of age for children up to age 10. It's water soluble so it gets eliminated from the body quickly. Therefore, take it in multiple doses throughout the day. The usual limiting factor is bowel intolerance (diarrhea). Work up slowly to your point of intolerance and then back off a little. When you get sick, you need much more and can usually tolerate two to three times your routine dose - an indication of how important your immune system thinks this substance is.

Source: A glass of freshly squeezed orange juice only contains about 80mg. You simply can't eat enough fruit and other high C foods to reach that 10,000 mg/day goal. Take it as a supplement - it's sold everywhere. Look for a pill form that has a smooth coating on it (the chalky ones stick in the back of your throat), or take it as a powder to be mixed with juice or food.

VITAMIN E: There have been over 6,000 studies on the benefits of vitamin E in the prevention and treatment of cardiovascular disease. Conversely, low blood levels of this vitamin were more predictive of the likelihood of having a heart attach than were having high cholesterol or high blood pressure. That's not to say that controlling high cholesterol or blood pressure isn't important - it is. But well done studies from around the world are showing that taking vitamin E daily is even more important. For instance, a study of 2000 patients reported on in the March 23, 1996 issue of The Lancet (England) revealed a 75% reduction in heart attacks for those given vitamin E versus the control group that got a placebo.

Dose: 400 to 800 I.U. once daily for adults (unlike vitamin C, it's fat soluble and hangs around, so once daily dosing is adequate).

Source: Look for the chemical name in small print. It should read d-alphatocopherol or d-alphatocopheryl. Avoid dL-alpha...as it is synthetically produced from turpentine and is thought to be inferior. I take a product called Unique made by A.C. Grace (903/636-4051). It is refined and purified so that a dose of 400 I.U. per 40 pounds of body weight can be taken. That's great except that it costs 10 times as much as regular vitamin E.

FLAXSEED OIL: Nature's best source of omega 3 oils (better than fish oil). The primary constituent is alpha-linolenic acid which is an essential oil (your body doesn't make it but you really need it). The usual American diet is very deficient in omega 3s, and supplementing with them can have a beneficial effect on high cholesterol levels, prevention of heart attacks and strokes, high blood pressure, rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis and exzema, and the prevention and treatment of some forms of cancer.

Dose: 1 to 2 tablespoons/day poured on food or taken as capsules.

Source: Omega Nutrition (800/745-8580) and Barlean's Organic Oils (800/445-3529).

BLUE GREEN ALGAE: Now, what about everything else. What about all the minerals and vitamins that we need for our bodies' chemical pathways to work well so that we heal wounds quickly, aren't subject to getting sick, and age as slowly and gracefully as our genetic potential should allow? Wouldn't it be nice to have an ultimate multivitamin/mineral fod that we could take in pill form to meet that need? Well, it exists. It's called blue green algae, and it is the most complete and perfect food on the planet. Blue green algae grows wild in the unpolluted water of Upper Klamath Lake, Oregon, and contains 73 minerals, 12 vitamins, and 20 amino acids. Because blue green algae is the original plant life form on earth, all animal life has evolved with body chemistry based on it. The micronutrients in our bodies are present in the same proportion to each other as those micronutrients that the blue green algae provides. And because it's a natural food, it is 97% assimilated. Synthetically produced micronutrient formulations do not achieve this level of bioavailability and may not even be accepted by the body the wy food based nutrients are. I've used commercial multivit/mineral pills, I've gone the individual pill for each vitamin route (and decorated entire counter tops with the bevy of bottles), but I've had my best results with blue green algae.

Dose: As few as four (4) tables twice/day to handfuls/day. It's a whole food, not a drug.

Source: Marketed by Cell Tech, Inc. through a network of independent distributors.