THE SCIENCE BEHIND WHY YOU NEED SUPPLEMENTS
Even If You're Doing Everything Right
BEN GREENFIELD
2024
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Let's begin with this: your modern, post-industrial, polluted, toxin-laden lifestyle demands more nutrients than food can provide.
That's right: the chronic stressors of modern life—whether it’s the iPhone screen interfering with your circadian rhythms and chronobiology, or the never-ending work deadlines, increase your nutrient needs.
Every day, you face hundreds of toxins—pollutants in the air, degraded plastic byproducts in drinking water, chemicals in cleaning products, and pesticides in your food—which further increase your body’s need for vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants. These nutrients are necessary to help shuttle toxins through natural detox pathways and prevent the formation of DNA-damaging free radicals. Even exercise is a stressor that increases your body’s need for nutrients.
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Furthermore, if you're a hard-charging, high-performing exercise enthusiast (like many people reading this), your nutrient requirements far exceed the recommendations for the general, sedentary population.
To make matters worse, you're likely not getting the full array of nutrients from the food that prior generations enjoyed. Due to modern farming techniques and fertilizers, most soil is depleted of nutrients, which decreases the beneficial vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants in conventionally-grown crops.
So perhaps eating organic is the ultimate solution? While some studies suggest that organically-grown foods contain more nutrients than non-organic, other studies conclude that there are no significant differences. Furthermore, for most of human history (and prehistory), your ancestors ate now nearly-extinct, dense cell-rich carbohydrates in the form of foods such as wild tubers, which provided essential prebiotics that helped probiotic bacteria flourish (in contrast to the refined “acellular” grains and white rice that comprise modern carbohydrates).
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Along the same lines, the abundance of refined carbohydrates and processed foods create significant blood sugar swings and glycemic variability your ancestors also didn't deal with to as great an extent. A glance at a coffee shop display case or hotel breakfast bar laden with bagels, muffins, and sugary cereals explains why many people need a snack a couple of hours later just to make it through the inevitable mid-morning blood sugar crash. Blood sugar imbalances lead to chronic inflammation and may be responsible for up to 80% of modern diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease (nicknamed “type 3 diabetes”), obesity, depression, and cancer.
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Similarly, the meat, eggs, and dairy products commonly found in grocery stores deliver fewer anti-inflammatory nutrients, such as omega-3 fatty acids, than wild or pastured animals. Speaking of omega-3 fatty acids, most Western diet munchers consume an imbalanced ratio of omega-6 fatty acids to omega-3 fatty acids, further predisposing us to rampant chronic inflammation.
To make it even more complicated, modern harvesting, shipping, processing, and storage techniques degrade the nutrient content of food. Plants grown with modern fertilizer can contain only 25% of the micronutrients of those grown using more traditional farming methods, and nutrients degrade as they are shipped and sit on store shelves. A fresh-picked apple is more nutritious than the apple you buy at the supermarket in winter, which was likely treated with 1-methylcyclopropene and could be up to 10 months old (according to an FDA spokesperson).
And the very preservatives used to maintain “freshness” could impede the bioavailability of the food’s nutrients—and increase your body’s need for nutrients to process these synthetic additives. Similarly, many common medications for acid reflux and hypertension also inhibit nutrient absorption.
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Then there are precious fat-soluble vitamins such as Vitamin D. Though the recommendations for sufficient Vitamin D levels are controversial, it’s safe to say that many Americans do not get enough of it. Even if you're doing your best to get sun exposure—whether it’s a morning walk or going outside for lunch—it’s rare to get as much sunlight (and Vitamin D) as your outdoor-dwelling ancestors did.
Last but not least, your ability to absorb nutrients from food decreases as you age. Given the scientifically-demonstrated longevity benefits of caloric restriction, it seems silly to argue that one could ignore calories and simply eat more food to obtain nutrients. This is another crucial area where supplements come in—a helpful boost if you want to live longer using strategies such as intermittent fasting, alternate-day fasting, or caloric restriction.
