By Kripa Watts

I have recently been reading some of the blogs about whole food supplements – the basic question being should you or shouldn’t you?  Is it worth paying the extra for a bottle of tablets that contain concentrated whole foods rather than simply chemical isolated vitamins and minerals?

The underlying premise of alternative health practitioners and the health food industry is that only by treating the whole person can we support optimal health - hence the term Holistic Health.  Those of us who are looking to live a natural and healthy life have recognized that there is an interweaving of elements within life, within nature and within the human body that is indescribably complex.  All of these elements need to be functioning harmoniously together in order for the whole to operate smoothly.

When we isolate nutrients from whole food we are immediately taking a step away from life – away from the whole.  We are saying for example, that ascorbic acid (Vitamin C) is important but the hundreds of other amazing compounds that are naturally found within a Vitamin C rich food, such as an orange, have no significance.  This is truly absurd!  On Dr Duke’s Phytochemical and Ethnobotanical Database you can easily look up the phytochemicals found in an orange.  On this wonderful web site you will discover for yourself that there are almost 300 micronutrients in an orange that have been identified to date.  In addition, if you look at the activities of these phytochemical compounds, you will see that many of them have extreme health supportive benefits.

Take a moment to consider the possibility that these 300 different compounds work together in some way – just like the different organs of the body work together.  Then compare the complexity that this represents to the single fraction which is isolated ascorbic acid.  I don’t know about you but I have to conclude that if you take out the Vitamin C and discard the orange you have pretty much just kept the bath water and thrown the baby out!  When I follow this simple line of reasoning I have to conclude that taking a supplement that delivers nutrients in a concentrated whole food is an exponentially better choice and is certainly worth a fraction more.