Orthomolecular Medicine for Everyone. Abram Hoffer, M.D., Ph.D.
price of not doing this is disease. The reward of doing so is good health.
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The Use of Food Supplements
Orthomolecular medicine applies the same scientific principles to the use of nutrients as are applied to the use of drugs. It is a hallowed principle of orthodox medicine that only optimum doses of drugs can be used, since too little will be ineffective and too much will be dangerous. Orthodox medicine has not applied this scientific rule to nutrition and to the use of nutrient supplements. It has been lulled by the belief that only very small amounts of nutrients are needed and there is no reason to determine optimum doses. This aging hypothesis has been proven wrong for many years, by many physicians, in thousands of reports. Orthomolecular medicine is a logical extension of the findings that nutrient accessory factors, such as vitamins and minerals, are essential. Food must contain not only carbohydrates, protein, and fat but also these accessory factors. It then follows that when foods are deficient in some of these nutrients, they cannot maintain health.
The medical profession no longer argues against the addition of small amounts of these accessory nutrients to food, such as adding vitamins to white flour, in order to prevent deficiency diseases like beriberi and pellagra. But those are low doses, for the prevention of deficiency diseases only. Orthomolecular medicine is the next logical step—it recognizes that since we are all different, we need varying amounts of these essential nutrients, and even fortified foods will be insufficient for some. These individuals must be given supplements as tablets or pills if they are to remain free of disease or cured of disease. We find it hard, as logical scientists, to believe that these simple concepts can be rejected any longer by the establishment. Orthomolecular nutrition is, in our view, merely good practical medicine that uses the same standard of care as the medical profession thinks it is using for drugs.
CAN SUPPLEMENTS COMPENSATE FOR A BAD DIET?
They’d better. In spite of decades of intense and well-funded mass education, 70 percent of Americans do not eat the recommended 5–9 servings of fruits and vegetables a day.1 And when a “serving” of fruit may be a six-ounce glass of juice and a “serving” of a vegetable is a mere half-cup of beans, it really makes you think. Since at least half of all Americans take vitamin supplements every day, one might be tempted to say that, to a considerable degree, the people have already answered the question. The public finally has the support of orthodox medicine. After years of disparaging supplements, the Journal of the American Medical Association finally published the recommendation that every person take a multivitamin daily.2
Recently, the New York Times questioned folic acid supplementation and even the practice of taking a daily multivitamin, stating that “vitamin supplements cannot correct for a poor diet (and) multivitamins have not been shown to prevent any disease.”3 The Times article neglected to emphasize the real story— people eat terribly.
Though eating less fat, more Westerners are more obese than ever before, and in the United States, an astounding 80 percent of persons over the age of twenty-five are overweight. Nearly two-thirds of all Americans (more than 120 million people) are overweight or obese, according to the 1999–2000 National Health and Nutrition Examination.4 Protein and sugar intake is astronomically high, while fruit and vegetable consumption is still ridiculously low. While vitamin supplements do not produce weight loss, persons trying to lose weight face a nutritional adequacy problem of their own. Approximately 50 million Americans admit to being on a diet at any given time. Virtually all popular unsupplemented weight loss plans are nutrient deficient. For many, eating less food means eating fewer food-source vitamins. Taking supplements can be seen as especially important for all people who are dieting.
Dietitians have set themselves the heroic but probably unattainable goal of getting every person to eat well every day. Even if obtained, such vitamin intake as a good diet provides is often still inadequate to maintain optimum health. For example, millions of women have a special concern: oral contraceptives lower serum levels of B vitamins, especially B6, plus folic acid and vitamin C.5
Furthermore, government vitamin recommendations are so low as to resemble a test so easy, a standard so minimal, that you would think no one could possibly fail. For example, the Dietary Reference Intake (DRI) for vitamin E is 15 international units (IU), yet it is widely appreciated that at least 100 IU of vitamin E (and probably 400 IU or more) daily is required to prevent a great deal of cardiovascular and other disease. Yet, it is literally impossible to obtain 100 IU of vitamin E from even the most perfectly planned diet. To demonstrate this, I (A.W. S.) challenged my nutrition students to create a few days of “balanced” meals to achieve 100 IU of vitamin E per day. They could attempt their objective with any combination of foods and any plausible number of portions of each food. The only limitation was that they had to design meals that a person would actually be willing to eat. As this ruled out prescribing whole grains by the pound and vegetable oils by the cup, they could not do it. Nor can the general public. Most people do not even get 30 IU of vitamin E a day from their diet.6
Supplements, by definition, are designed to fill nutritional gaps in a bad diet, but they fill in what may be surprisingly large gaps in a good diet as well. In the case of vitamin E, doing so is likely to save millions of lives. Researchers found that persons taking vitamin E supplements had an approximately 40 percent reduction in cardiovascular disease. Nearly 40,000 men and 87,000 women took part in the studies. The more vitamin E they took, and the longer they took it, the less cardiovascular disease they experienced.7 Even a modest quantity of vitamin C prevents disease and saves lives. Just 500 mg daily results in a 42 percent lower risk of death from heart disease and a 35 percent lower risk of death from any cause.8 Since two-thirds of the population is not eating sufficient fruits and vegetables, the only way to close the gap is with vitamin supplements.
Since the time of the ancient Egyptians right up to the present, poor diet has been described and decried by physicians. Little has changed for the better, and much has changed for the worse. Though nutritionists place a nearly puritanical emphasis on food selection as our vitamin source, everyone else eats because they are hungry, because it makes them feel better, and because it gives such hedonistic pleasure. No one likes the “food police.” Telling people what they should do is rarely an unqualified success, and with something as intensely personal as food, well, good luck.
In spite of all attempts to educate, implore, and exhort the citizenry to “eat a balanced diet” and follow the food groups charts, obesity is more prevalent and cancer is no less prevalent. Cardiovascular disease is still the number one killer of men and women. The completely unavoidable conclusion is that our dinner tables are killing us. Supplements make any dietary lifestyle, whether good or bad, significantly better.
As it has been for thousands of years of human history, so the malnutrition problem remains with us today. Only in the last century have supplements even been available and their continued use represents a true public health breakthrough on a par with clean drinking water and sanitary sewers, and can be expected to save as many lives.
STUDY SHOWS VITAMIN “PILL-POPPERS” ARE HEALTHIER
New research indicates that not taking supplements may be harmful to your health, and that a single daily multivitamin is inadequate. A study of hundreds of persons who take a number of different dietary supplements has found that the more supplements they take, the better