More than degraded nutritional content of food prompts a thinking person to use food supplements. Our bodies and spirits are constantly assaulted and insulted by modern life in ways our genetics never intended us to deal with. Today the entire environment is mildly toxic. Air is polluted; water is polluted; our food supply contains traces of highly poisonous artificial molecules that our bodies have no natural ability to process and eliminate. Our cities and work places are full of loud, shocking noises that trigger frequent adrenaline rushes and other stress adaptations. Our work places are full of psychological stresses that humans never had to deal with before.
Historically, humans who were not enslaved have been in control of determining their own hour to hour, day to day activities, living on their own largely self-sufficient farms. The idea of working for another, at regular hours, without personal liberty, ignoring or suppressing one's own agenda and inclinations over an entire lifetime is quite new and not at all healthy. It takes continual subconscious applications of mental and psychic energies to protect ourselves against the stresses of modern life, energies that we don't know we're expending. This is also highly enervating. Thus to remain healthy we may need nutrition at levels far higher than might be possible through eating food; even ideal food might not contain enough vitamins to sustain us against the strains and stresses of this century.
And think about Dr. Pottenger's cats. Our bodies are at the poorer end of a century-long process of mass degeneration that started with white flour from the roller mill. Compared to my older clients I have noticed that my younger patients seem to possess less vital force on the average, show evidence of poorer skeletal development, have poorer teeth, less energy, have far more difficulty breeding and coping with their family life, and are far more likely to develop degenerative conditions early. Most of my younger patients had a poor start because they were raised on highly refined, devitalized, deficient foods, and grew up without much exercise. Their parents had somewhat better food. Some of their grandparents may have even grown up on raw milk and a vegetable garden, and actually had to walk, not owning cars when they were young. Their great grandparents had a high likelihood of enjoying decent nutrition and a healthful life-style.
Unfortunately, most of my patients like the idea of taking vitamins too much for their own good. The AMA medical model has conditioned people to swallow something for every little discomfort, and taking a pill is also by far the easiest thing to do because a pill requires no life-style changes, nor self-discipline, nor personal responsibility. But vitamins are much more frugal than drugs. Compared to prescriptions, even the most exotic life extension supplements are much less expensive. I am saddened when my clients tell me they can't afford supplements. When their MD prescribes a medicine that costs many times more they never have trouble finding the money.
I am also saddened that people are so willing to take supplements, because I can usually do a lot more to genuinely help their bodies heal with dietary modification and detoxification. Of all the tools at my disposal that help people heal, last in the race comes supplements.
One of the best aspects of using vitamins as though they were healing agents is that food supplements almost never have harmful side effects, even when they are taken in what might seem enormous overdoses. If someone with a health condition reads or hears about some vitamin being curative, goes out and buys some and takes it, they will at very least have followed the basic principle of good medicine: first of all do no harm. At worst, if the supplements did nothing for them at all, they are practicing the same kind of benevolent medicine that Dr. Jennings did almost two centuries ago. Not only that, but having done something to treat their symptoms, they have become patients facilitating their own patience, giving their body a chance to correct its problem. They well may get better, but not because of the action of the particular vitamin they took. Or, luckily, the vitamin or vitamins they take may have been just what was needed, raising their body's vital force and accelerating the body's ability to solve its problem.
One reason vitamin therapies frequently do not work as well as they might is that, having been intimidated by AMA propaganda that has created largely false fears in the public mind about harmful effects of vitamin overdoses, the person may not take enough of the right vitamin. The minimum daily requirements of vitamins and minerals as outlined in nutrition texts are only sufficient to prevent the most obvious forms of deficiency diseases. If a person takes supplements at or near the minimum daily requirement (the dose recommended by the FDA as being 'generally recognized as safe') they should not expect to see any therapeutic effect unless they have scurvy, beri beri, rickets, goiter, or pellagra.
In these days of vitamin-fortified bread and iodized salt, and even vitamin C fortified soft drinks, you almost never see the kind of life-threatening deficiency states people first learned to recognize, such as scurvy. Sailors on long sea voyages used to develop a debilitating form of vitamin C deficiency that could kill. Scurvy could be quickly cured by as little as one lime a day. For this reason the British Government legislated the carrying of limes on long voyages and today that is why British sailors are still called limeys. A lime has less than 30 milligrams of vitamin C. But to make a cold clear up faster with vitamin C a mere 30 mg does absolutely nothing! To begin to dent an infection with vitamin C takes 10,000 milligrams a day, and to make a life threatening infection like pneumonia go away faster might require 25,000 to 150,000 milligrams of vitamin C daily, administered intravenously. In terms of supplying that much C with limes, that's 300 to 750 of them daily--clearly impossible.
Similarly, pellagra can be cured with a few milligrams of vitamin B 3, but schizophrenia can sometimes be cured with 3,000 milligrams, roughly a thousand times as much as the MDR.
There are many many common diseases that the medical profession does not see as being caused by vitamin deficiencies. Senility and many mental disorders fall in this category. Many old people live on extremely deficient diets comprised largely of devitalized starches, sugars, and fats, partly because many do not have good enough teeth to chew vegetables and other high roughage foods, and they do not have the energy it takes to prepare more nourishing foods. Virtually all old people have deficiency diseases. As vital force inevitably declines with age, the quantity and quality of digestive enzymes decreases, then the ability to breakdown and extract soluble nutrients from food is diminished, frequently leading to serious deficiencies. These deficiencies are inevitably misdiagnosed as disease and as aging.