Insufficient nutrition when taking nutritional supplements and vitamin supplements? Nephrologist reveals the truth: Taking fish oil cannot replace eating seafood
Is it okay to take multivitamins? Why are archetypal foods irreplaceable?
Are you worried that fruits are too sweet and contain too much sugar? How about taking a “multivitamin” that supplements nutrients? Nephrology specialist Dr. Wang Jieli issued an article saying, “Don’t eat fruits, just take multivitamins.” The idea is to regard fruits as simple “fructose” plus “several vitamins.” However, the nutritional composition of the prototype food is relatively complex and may have an irreplaceable role as nutritional supplements.
Dr. Wang Jieli stated in the article that the vast majority of carbon-based life on earth is rarely like nutritional supplements, which only exist in less than 10 molecular states. The purpose of humans eating prototype fruits is to “prototype”. Many invisible ingredients will be lost during food processing. For example, if you only drink juice, you won’t get the dietary fiber of fruits. The purpose of eating prototype fruit is to eat the “most complete ingredients.”
Many people choose to take extra vitamin supplements to make up for the nutritional deficiencies in their daily diet, but the effectiveness is always uneven. Dr. Wang Jieli believes that the problem with vitamins is that civilization and technology are not yet in place. The complexity of vitamin ingredients a thousand years from now may be thousands of times more than that of today’s vitamin supplements.
Dr. Wang Jieli emphasized that the prototype food a thousand years from now will definitely be similar to the prototype food today. Because the speed of evolution is not that fast, it is difficult to create a life with completely different ingredients for human consumption in a thousand years.
Can nutritional supplements increase life expectancy? Doctor: Only folic acid
Wouldn’t supplementing missing nutrients bring health benefits? Dr. Wang Jieli believes that when talking about “prevention” and “increase”, the emphasis is on the causal relationship between the two. To determine the causal relationship of the efficacy, the most ideal method is a standardized double-blind randomized clinical trial. Not only in mathematics It can be proved that it is also the basis of biostatistics.
However, among the various nutrients studied by scientists, the only one that has sufficient scientific evidence to prevent diseases and increase life span for the “healthy and disease-free” general public is “folic acid”. Moreover, when women of pregnant age take folic acid supplements, the life expectancy of their unborn fetuses increases.
Does taking calcium supplements increase the risk of kidney stones? Does eating fish oil mean eating seafood?
Similar research results are not uncommon. Dr. Wang Jieli said that nutritional ingredients such as fish oil, vitamin D3, and calcium tablets are all expected to improve human health. However, numerous observational studies have confirmed that eating more seafood is associated with longer life, but most clinical trials on fish oil have failed.
“The biggest problem with vitamins is not the ingredients they have, but the ingredients they don’t have. You don’t know what you are missing when you take vitamins!” Dr. Wang Jieli pointed out that studies have proven it in the past Eating high-calcium foods will not increase the chance of calcium kidney stones, but eating calcium tablets will increase the incidence of calcium kidney stones. This is an obvious example.
“Because calcium tablets lack a lot of nutrients from high-calcium foods, we don’t even know which combination of nutrients is important!” Dr. Wang Jieli emphasized that eating seafood is not just to absorb unsaturated fatty acids, but to In order to “completely replicate” the fact that eating seafood can prolong life. What’s more, there is no evidence that taking fish oil can replace the benefits of eating whole seafood.
The future of nutritional supplements? Genetic analysis adds data
If the current forms of nutritional supplements are not enough to achieve real therapeutic effects, what will be the future trend of nutritional supplements? Dr. Wang Jieli believes that only by combining human genetic analysis technology, such as high-throughput mapping, with the big data computing power of supercomputers to find out “personalization” and “precision”, can we have the opportunity to achieve the maximum benefit of nutritional supplements. This part still awaits the future progress of technological hard power.
“Unless you believe that the nutritional supplement ingredients currently used by humans are the highest manifestation of nutritional technology, they will not progress in the next thousand years. But, is it possible?” Dr. Wang Jieli believes that effective and popular personalization and precision Medical treatment still has a long way to go, and nutritional product research and nutritional technology are no exception.
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