What do you think about taking multivitamins?

The first thing I thought in reading the Naturally Yours blog post about some study finding no benefits from multivitamins was "I bet the study only looked at synthetic vitamins." Well, not even that close...so this is just a friendly reminder not to take any study about health at face value until you know who funded it, what their agenda was and what the detailed specifics were. It saddens me that the general public doesn't even realize they should be questioning these health tidbits they get on the news.

But back to multivitamins, I'd like to share a few things I've heard in recent years and encourage others to comment and add wisdom to this post.

1. The problem with synthetic vitamins (like you'd get at Target) is that they are made from petroleum for starters, but more importantly, according to the Chinese Doctor I went to in Chicago, that your body doesn't react to them the same way it does vitamins from natural sources, like food. Your body knows that the vitamin was made from a chemical and tries to deal with it, but wasn't designed to deal with it and has to spend more time and resources figuring out how to get rid of the non-natural/foreign substance instead of helping repair and heal the body. So basically, any money spent on syntethic vitamins (including the ones fortified into so many products like cereal and soy milk) are wasted money at best, and probably causing harm to your body. Or so I've decided...

2. A contradicting point: it's best to get all the vitamins and minerals your body needs from the food you eat. But I've also heard that due to common farming practices and travel time to get food from across the world to your grocery store that most foods you buy at the grocery store don't have enough nutrients left in them to meet our daily needs. On the flip side, I would assume that locally grown food bought directly from a farmer who practices sustainable farming practices would supply the nutrients we need, but in Central Illinois, we're severely limited in the scope of foods that can be grown here and the growing season. Most CSAs are only 26 or 27 weeks and the farmers markets are even shorter. So at the very least, I think vitamins in the winter are important, but only if made from natural sources and not petro-chemicals. Yuck!