General consensus is that if you want overall nutritional insurance in a supplement form, you should be taking a multivitamin. The truth is, when you take a multivitamin, you are getting many synthetic forms of nutrients and in amounts that do not represent whole foods. These different amounts of different nutrients typically don’t represent what you’d get in real foods and can actually end up being problematic.
For instance, if you take vitamin D in the wrong form, or without fat, you will have no effect and your body won’t absorb any of it. If you take too much calcium and not the right amount of the right form of vitamin K, you can increase arterial plaques. It is a very common occurrence when taking artificially derived and combined nutrients that “if you take too much (blank) and not enough (blank), this can lead to (blank) problem."
The point is that we don’t know enough about nutrition, how nutrients are absorbed and even what nutrients in our food make us thrive to make a magic pill to keep us healthy.
Some nutrients have a more profound effect on your body in different forms and some only get absorbed in the presence of other nutrients. It would be impossible to extract the top 15 nutrients and put them in a pill form when this picture is not overall very clear to us how these compounds act (or interact).
The good news is that real food takes care of this issue of guessing what we need and when. You would ideally skip an artificially produced multivitamin and get your nutrition from a diverse spectrum of whole foods. However, that is not always practical or possible. But if you can’t (or don’t want to) get massive amounts of nutrition from whole foods, where should you look?
A high quality greens powder can help bridge this gap. These are products that take whole foods and condense them into powdered form, maintaining as many vitamins, minerals and plant nutrients as possible. This is why a greens powder can be much more powerful than a multivitamin. You are getting the full spectrum and all of the nutrition we know of (and don’t know of) in the plants that are being used in the product.
But who should be seeking the benefits of extra plant nutrition?
A properly designed greens powder can be powerful for anyone who:
- Wants more real food based nutrients
- Wants less inflammation
- Wants more energy
- Wants to recover from workouts quicker
- Doesn’t eat enough fruits or vegetables
- Doesn’t have access to a variety of fresh fruits and vegetables
- Gets sick often or feels like they are getting sick
- Works a lot with people who may be sick
- Travels frequently
But, what is a properly designed greens powder? For the answer to that and more information, check out Part III of this series: Why Greens Powders Are NOT Created Equally
