Isn’t My Diet Good Enough?
Supplements are one of those things that you don’t really take seriously until you realize just how much our diets fail us. If you’re like most people, your diet is pretty consistent with not a lot of variety in the foods you eat. Maybe you eat chicken a few nights a week, some red meat, some veggies, potatoes, etc. Is there anything wrong with that? Not necessarily! What I just described could be considered a well balanced diet, depending on the proportions.
Where most of us fall short is that we don’t take into account the fact that our foods may not be as nutritionally dense as we think they are. That’s right – our food might be failing us. There have been many studies that suggest that overfarming of our lands have led to less nutrient dense soil. This ultimately leads to less nutritionally valuable crops. Additionally, unless we specifically seek out meats which have been grass fed, farm raised, and kept free from hormones (note the significant difference in hormones farmers give livestock and the hormones prescribed in BHRT), we may be causing harm to our own bodies.
How Supplements Can Help
That said, I don’t mean to cause alarm. There are plenty of ways to improve our diets and to make sure we receive the vitamins and nutrients our bodies require. We have certain needs as humans that can sometimes be difficult to meet simply by eating right. That’s where supplements come in! By definition, a supplement is something that completes or enhances something else when added to it. Here, I’m specifically referring to dietary supplements. You can think of these as the back up to your (hopefully) otherwise balanced diet. Many people fail to get enough iron, magnesium, and vitamin d through diet and lifestyle alone, for instance.
It’s easy to take this information and think that the solution is to pick up a bottle of multivitamins from the grocery store. However, there are a couple strong arguments against this simple fix. One is that you may not need all of the vitamins and minerals being supplied by the multivitamin, and so you could be overcompensating and shooting at the wrong target. Another is that off the shelf vitamins may not be of the highest quality. A phrase often used by nutritionists, supplement experts, and practitioners is that a regular multivitamin is more likely to end up in your toilet than in your bloodstream.
What Are The Best Supplements to Take?
The best way to find out which supplements you should be taking is to get a micronutrient test. This is where your blood is tested for the presence of nutrients and vitamins, giving you a real understanding of what your body is lacking. Once you have that information, it’s much easier to know what supplements you should be taking, and in what volume. But that’s not all there is to it. It’s also important to make sure that the supplements you’re taking are high quality so that you aren’t wasting your money or missing the mark with your wellness.
In our opinion, the highest quality supplements come from compounding pharmacies. These are facilities that create custom medications from base ingredients for patients. Rather than providing a pre-mixed formula, the compounding pharmacist begins with base drugs, combining and preparing them to fit the individual patient’s needs. We at Florida Center for Hormones and Wellness work with a compounding pharmacy local to us called Xymogen, and we are able to prescribe our patients specific combinations of supplements to fit their exact needs.
Interested in a micronutrients test or high quality supplements? Feel free to reach out to our office and ask how you can get yours today!
