Cornucopia’s Take: Dietary supplements are often billed as sources of crucial vitamins and minerals and have become a lucrative industry. Unfortunately, there is little regulation of supplements, and consumers frequently cannot be certain what they are ingesting. Cornucopia recommends people get as much of their nutrients as they can from a wide variety of the healthiest organic, whole foods.
You don’t need pricey pills to unlock optimal health?.
There’s a lot of good research backing the health benefits of some supplements.
The problem: While the pills used in scientific studies are carefully tested for quality and dosage accuracy, most consumer OTC supplements are largely unregulated, says Mark Moyad, M.D., director of preventive and alternative medicine at the University of Michigan. (Ever get prescribed a drug off-label? Here’s what that means.)
Dr. Moyad explains that few people are checking to make sure your OTC pills are free of heavy metals and other harmful contaminants. There’s even less oversight when it comes to ensuring the pills you’re taking contain the types and amounts of nutrients listed on the label.
“When you’re taking a pill, you’re also taking a lot of not-natural stuff that’s in that pill—stuff like herbicides, pesticides, hormones, the stuff in the capsule or shell itself, allergens, and even sand, which is used as a stabilizer,” he says.
While he’s quick to say that supplements can be hugely helpful if you’re sick or trying to treat a specific medical condition, he says that, if you’re healthy, the risks aren’t really worth it. (Here are 3 Supplements That Are Just Wasting Your Money—and 3 You May Actually Consider.)
“Especially when you see so many of these supplement nutrients are available in food, to take a handful of pills is a crazy,” he says. “If you look at the world’s so-called blue zones where people live longest, they tend not to take any pills at all.”
Here, he offers dozens of foods that ably stand in for supplements men tend to buy. Unlike a supplement, you can’t eat a specific amount of these to ensure a benefit. But by packing your diet with these foods, you’ll bolster your health without the dangers supplements pose.
The Nutrient: Leucine Take It For: Muscle health The Details: “Leucine helps stimulate muscle protein synthesis, maybe better than any other amino acid,” Dr. Moyad says. The Foods: Lean beef, chicken, fish, turkey and eggs. (For a leucine-packed breakfast, try this killer combo.)
The Nutrient: Nitric Oxide Take It For: Heart health The Details: “Nitric oxide helps keep blood flowing to all parts of the body,” Dr. Moyad says. The Foods: Beets and beet root juice, spinach, and bok choy (Chinese cabbage)
The Nutrients: Lutein and Zeaxanthin Take Them For: Eye Health The Details: Multiple studies, including a 2015 paper in the British Journal of Ophthalmology, have linked these two compounds to improved retinal health and lower rates of age-related macular degeneration—a major cause of vision problems and loss. The Foods: Kale, spinach, and eggs—including the yolks. “These compounds are fat-soluble,” Dr. Moyad adds. Eat them with avocado or olive oil, and the healthy fats in those foods will help your body absorb more of these nutrients, he says.
The Nutrient: Salicylic Acid Take It For: Preventing runaway inflammation The Details: “This is basically aspirin in its natural source, and people are always surprised when I tell them they can get it from food,”Dr. Moyad says. Research in Molecular Medicine finds salicylic acid appears to fight pain by controlling inflammation, which might also explain how a low-dose aspirin helps some men avoid heart trouble. The Foods: Asparagus, nectarines, and the spices turmeric and paprika
The Nutrient: Insoluble Fiber Take It For: Digestive health How it Works: “Insoluble fiber is like a broom that sweeps out your digestive tract,” Dr. Moyad says. “It may even carry carcinogens with it.” He says the fiber you’d get from a powder supplement tends to be soluble, which isn’t nearly as helpful. The Foods: Beans, seeds, lentils and bran.
The Nutrient: Theanine Take It For: Reducing stress and enhancing calm How it Works: This amino acid had been linked time and again to lower rates of anxiety and stress, Dr. Moyad says. One 2015 study also found it may sharpen thinking and improve mood, though exactly how it works isn’t well understood. The Food: Green tea
The Nutrient: Potassium Take It For: Keeping your blood pressure in check The Details: Potassium helps your body regulate its sodium levels—even if you’re ingesting a lots of salt, Dr. Moyad says. That in turn appears to keep your blood pressure from skyrocketing even if your diet isn’t ideal. The Foods: Wild salmon and avocado, papaya, potatoes (with skin), prunes, dates and dried figs
The Nutrient: Magnesium Take It For: To prevent muscle and joint soreness, headaches and migraines The Details: “There’s a lot of study going on and many potential mechanisms, but in short it just seems to normalize muscle and cell function in a lot of ways,” Dr. Moyad says. The Foods: All legumes (beans, peas, lentils, etc.), along with pumpkin and squash seeds. In fact, here are the 10 best sources of magnesium.
The Nutrient: Beta-sitosterol Take It For: Strong urine flow and prostate health The Details: “When you see the prostate supplement commercials making all these health claims, beta-sitosterol is the thing providing all those benefits,” Dr. Moyad says. “You can get pretty large amounts of it from some incredibly healthy food sources.” The Foods: Plant oils, pistachio nuts, sesame seeds and avocado.
From 2000 to 2015, half a million people died from prescription drug overdoses. Stories continue to roll in daily about the lives claimed by prescription and non-prescription drug overdoses. Cannabis is not only excluded from the overdose drug list, but it reduces the use of dangerous prescription drugs.
Raw cannabis is considered by many experts as a dietary essential. As a powerful anti-inflammatory and antioxidant, some classify it as one of the most important plants on earth. The biggest benefits from the plant may come not by smoking it, but rather by consuming it in its raw and natural form.
"If cannabis were discovered in an Amazon rainforests today, people would be clambering to make as much use as they could out of the potential benefits of the plant," said Donald L. Abrams, MD, Chief of Hematology and Oncology at San Francisco General Hospital and Professor of Medicine at the University California. Dr. Abrams is widely known for his research on medical cannabis applications. "Unfortunately, it carries with it a long and not so long history of being a persecuted plant," he added.
5 Diseases Proven To Respond Better To Cannabis Than Prescription Drugs
"The potential for addiction and health risks associated with using multiple scheduled drugs places additional direct monetary and health costs on patients and healthcare systems due to an increased number of side effects, risky drug interactions, dependency, and overdose" stated University of New Mexico researchers Jacob Miguel Vigil and Sarah See Stith, of a new study titled, Effects of Legal Access to Cannabis on Scheduled II-V Drug Prescriptions, which will be soon released in an upcoming issue of the Journal of American Medical Directors Association. The study resulted from insights provided by co-investigator Dr. Anthony Reeve, a pain specialist from the Industrial Rehabilitation Pain Clinics, Albuquerque, N.M. and also one of the first physicians to authorize the use of cannabis for patients with chronic pain in the state of New Mexico. Reeve observed a number of his patients coming back to see him, not only less frequently after enrolling in the New Mexico Medical Cannabis Program (MCP), but anecdotally, they would often claim that they were not only reducing their pain medications, but other types of prescription medications as well. In their historical cohort study the researchers compared individuals that enrolled in the medical cannabis program to individuals with a similar diagnosis that chose not to enroll in the medical cannabis program but were offered the same authorization, to measure the effect of enrollment in a state-authorized United States' MCP on Scheduled II-V drug prescription patterns. They compared 83 chronic pain patients, who enrolled in the New Mexico Medical Cannabis Program during a five+ year period from April 2010 to October 2015, to 42 non-enrolled patients over a 24 month period (starting 6 months prior to enrollment for the MCP patients) using the Prescription Monitoring Program. Using outcome variables including baseline levels and pre- and post-enrollment monthly trends in the numbers of drug prescriptions, distinct drug classes, dates prescription drugs were filled, and prescribing providers, the researchers found that 28 cannabis program enrollees (34 percent) and one comparison group patient (2 percent) ceased the use of all scheduled prescription medications by the last six months of the observation period. Age and gender-adjusted regressions show that, although no statistically significant differences existed in pre-enrollment levels and trends, the post-enrollment trend among MCP patients is statistically significantly negative for all four measures of scheduled drug medication usage, while the post-enrollment trend is zero among the comparison group. The cannabis program enrollees showed statistically significantly lower levels across all four measures in comparison to the non-enrollees by 10 months post-enrollment. The researchers hypothesize that legal access to cannabis may reduce the use of multiple classes of dangerous prescription medications in certain patient populations. "Our current opioid epidemic is the leading preventable form of death in the United States, killing more people than car accidents and gun violence," said Vigil, the senior author and Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology. "No one has ever died from smoking too much cannabis. Therefore, the relative safety and efficacy of using cannabis in comparison to that of the other scheduled medications should be taken by the health providers and legislators, and may very well to have been considered by the patients in our study." The authors state that increased patient access to MCPs could impact prescription drug activity in numerous ways. "Potentially, MCPs might drive increased prescribing of medications as a result of side effects of cannabis use, including agitation or somnolence. Alternatively, access to cannabis could lead to a reduction in scheduled prescription drug use, if it treats patients' underlying condition(s) more effectively than scheduled drugs requiring a prescription." The researchers are currently employing naturalistic studies to identify how older patients use and are affected by opioids, benzodiazepines, and medical cannabis for treating significant and societally expensive health conditions.
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