HealthNews

Making Up For What's Missing
Healthful diets contain plenty of vegetables, fruits, grains and low-fat dairy products and relatively small amounts of lean meat, skinless poultry and fish. Many people simply eat a lot of fast foods and sweets and skimp on dietary staples such as fruits and vegetables. Can supplements make up for what is missing and restore nutritional balance?

According to Dr. T. Colin Campbell, a professor of nutritional biochemistry, at Cornell University in Ithica, New York, "One of the biggest problems with typical diet is not so much that it's low in vitamins and minerals, but that it's high in nutrients people should cut back on, such as fat and sodium. And

supplements do little or nothing to counteract these nutrient's effects. Thus, to use them in place of a healthful diet is like putting a Band-Aid on a major wound."

Furthermore, while good nutrition is terribly important, it's not simple a matter of the individual nutrients supplements contain. There's a great deal we don't know about food factors beyond vitamins and minerals. Fiber is one of those factors. Only now is its role in maintaining good health beginning to be determined.

Take Minerals. It may be true that if you eat a highly processed diet, you are not

getting enough vitamins and minerals, but scientists may not yet know enough about them to have developed an adequate supplement. For one thing, we don't know all the trace elements we need. Every ten years or so we discover another essential mineral, and add it to the list of essential nutrients. Minerals need to be taken in a specific ratio, because they compete with each other for carrier sites, and occasionally have opposing functions. If you eat a lot of one mineral, you decrease your utilization of another. The old theory, "if a little is good, a lot must be better," does not hold up. An excess of vitamins and minerals has undesirable side effects.

Minerals are classified into two groups: those needed by the body in large amounts (Group 1) and those required in smaller amounts (Group 2).

Of the Group 1 minerals, Sodium, Potassium, and Chloride are present in the body as electrically charged particles called ions. They function together to control and regulate the flow of nutrients into the cells and waste products out of the cells. Calcium, Phosphorus, and Magnesium are minerals bound to protien molecules as structural parts of bone. Calcium represents 40% of the body's total mineral content. It is essential for blood clotting, the transport of fluids across cell membranes, and for muscular contractions. It also combines with phosphorus to form bones and teeth.

The Group 2 minerals are called trace minerals. Flourine is essential for healthy dental and bone formation. Iodine is a necessary ingredent for Thyroxine production. Zinc is needed for normal growth, tissue repair, blood cell formation and reproduction functions. Iron is involved in energy metabolism of all cells; it is used to produce new hemoglobin, which is a protien substance in blood that creates the red color and carries oxygen. The rest of the absorbed iron is used for growth or stored. Women utilize approximately twice the amount of iron as men, so a deficiency is often present. This is due to the stress put on the body during menstruation. Special attention should be given to meeting iron requirements by ingesting iron rich foods. Selenium is responsible for elasticity of body tissues and increase in oxygen supply to the heart. Chromium contributes to glucose and energy metabolism and is an integral part of many enzymes.