Vitamins : Part 3

How and When To Be Your Own Doctor
by Dr. Isabelle A. Mose, Steve Solomon

(Page 9 of 14)

My point is that there is a big difference between preventing a gross vitamin deficiency disease, and using vitamins to create optimum functioning. Any sick person or anyone with a health complaint needs to improve their overall functioning in any way that won't be harmful over the long term. Vitamin therapy can be an amazingly effective adjunct to dietary reform and detoxification.

Some of the earlier natural hygienists were opposed to using vitamins. However, these doctors lived in an era when the food supply was better, when mass human degeneration had not proceeded as far as it has today. From their perspective, it was possible to obtain all the nutrition one needed from food. In our time this is unlikely unless a person knowingly and intelligently produces virtually all their own food on a highly fertile soil body whose fertility is maintained and adjusted with a conscious intent to maximize the nutritive content of the food. Unfortunately, ignorance of the degraded nature of industrial food seems to extend to otherwise admirable natural healing methods such as Macrobiotics and homeopathy because these disciplines also downplay any need for food supplementation.

Vitamins For Young Persons And Children

Young healthy people from weaning through their thirties should also take nutritional supplements even though young people usually feel so good that they find it impossible to conceive that anything could harm them or that they ever could become seriously sick or actually die. I know this is true because I remember my own youth and besides, why else would young people so glibly ride motorcycles or, after only a few months of brainwashing, charge up a hill into the barrel of a machine gun. Or have unsafe sex in this age of multiple venereal diseases. Until they get a little sense, vitamin supplements help to counteract their inevitable and unpreventable use of recreational foods. Vitamins are the cheapest long life and health insurance plan now available. Parents are generally very surprised at the thought that even their children need nutritional supplements; very few healthy children receive them. A few are given extra vitamin C when acutely ill, when they have colds or communicable diseases such as chicken pox.

Young people require a low dose supplement compared to those of us middle-aged or older, but it should be a broad formula with the full range of vitamins and minerals. Some of the best products I have found over 25 years of research and experimentation with young people are Douglas Cooper's 'Basic Formula' (low dose and excellent for children) and 'Super T Formula' (double the dose of Basic Formula, therefore better for adolescents and young adults), also from Douglas Cooper Company; Bronson's 'Vitamin and Mineral Formula for Active Men and Women' and Bronson's 'Insurance Formula.' 'Vitamin 75 Plus;' and 'Formula 2' from Now Natural Foods are also good and less costly.

Healthy very small children who will swallow pills can take these same products at half the recommended dose. If they won't swallow pills the pills can be blended into a fruit smoothie or finely crushed and then stirred into apple sauce. There are also 'Children's Chewable Multi-Vitamins + Iron' (1-5 years old) from Douglas Cooper that contains no minerals except iron, Bronson's 'Chewable Vitamins' (make sure it is the one for small children, Bronson makes several types of chewables) and a liquid vitamin product from Bronson called Multivitamin Drops for Infants . These will be a little more costly than cutting pills in half.

There is also an extraordinarily high quality multivitamin/mineral formula for children called 'Children's Formula Life Extension Mix' from Prolongevity, Ltd. (the Life Extension Foundation), it is in tablet form, and slightly more expensive.

I hope that my book will be around for several generations. The businesses whose vitamin products I recommend will not likely exist in twenty years. Even sooner than that the product names and details of the formulations will almost certainly be altered. So, for future readers discovering this book in a library or dusty shelve of a used book store, if I, at my current level of understanding, were manufacturing a childrens and young adults vitamin formula myself, this is what it would contain. Any commercial formulation within 25 percent of these figures plus or minus would probably be fine as long as the vitamins in the pills were of high quality.

Vitamins For An Older Healthy Person

Someone who is beyond 35 to 40 years of age should still feel good almost all of the time. That is how life should be. But enjoying well-being does not mean that no dietary supplementation is called for. The onset of middle age is the appropriate time to begin working on continuing to feel well for as long as possible. Just like a car, if you take very good care of it from the beginning, it is likely to run smoothly for many years into the future. If on the other hand you drive it hard and fast with a lot of deferred maintenance you will probably have to trade it in on a new one after a very few years. Most people in their 70s and older who are struggling with many uncomfortable symptoms and low energy lament, 'if I'd only known I was going to live so long I would have taken better care of myself.' But at that point it is too late for the old donkey; time for a trade in.

Gerontologists refer to combating the aging process as 'squaring the curve.' We arrive at the peak of our physical function at about age eighteen. How high that peak level is depends on a person's genetic endowment, the quality of the start they received through their mother's nutritional reserves, and the quality of their childhood nutrition and life experience. From that peak our function begins to drop. The rate of drop is not uniform, but is a cascade where each bit of deterioration creates more deterioration, accelerating the rate of deterioration. If various aging experiences were graphed, they would make curves like those on the chart on this page.