Bringing Supplements to India

nayan

this is a very stupid question.....
doesnt normal balance diet cover all our nutitional needs? (unless you are a top level athlete or have any particular deficiency/medical conditions)
The doctors I have spoken to seems to discourage eating vitamin suppliments unless you have a deficiency.

mousourik

Nayan,
this is not a stupid question. Everybody needs supplements. How are u so sure that normal diet fulfills all your nutritional requirements ? The main source of vitamins (and more essentially minerals) is fruits and vegetables. When the farmer grows them, they use pesticides which reduce nutritional value. When crops are harvested, if they are not processed within a few hours, they lose much of their nutritional contents. During the process of cooking and refrigeration (which is a part of our daily life), these are lost further.

Besides, nature has made every nutrient available in all the food sources. But unfortunately we don't know which source contains what nutrients and in what quantity. Everybody of us has a fixed eating habit - basically we eat the same things over a week's time. But if you don't take everything in adequate quantities, there will always be a nutritional gap which ultimately leads to today's lifestyle diseases like diabetes, stroke, cancer, heart diseases.

The minerals are more important than the vitamins - they are required in very small quantities, but are hard to be found. Mineral deficiency can hardly be identified by clinical tests. So it's always advisable to supplement with multi-vitamin multi-mineral.

This will ensure prevention which, we all know, is better than curing. Everybody of us lives within a police station area, but do we forget to lock the main door at night ? Because that's basic prevention - if u don't do that the chances of theft in your house will be manyfold. Although the percentage of theft in our life is negligibly small, but still we don't forget to lock the door.
Taking a supplement is like locking your door - this will reduce your visits to the police station i.e. the doctor here who only does the curing part. In no medical college in India nutritional aspect is taught, so doctors don't study it and hence don't recommend supplements either. This will also reduce their number of patients !