A friend recently asked me if I gave my kids a multivitamin. I don’t. Actually, I never have. I have always been a little leery of the idea of supplementation. I never took any myself, except when I was pregnant. It always just seemed like a better idea to eat healthy food and get what you needed that way. Ironically, I spent years thinking I was doing this…but it turns out that I was depleting my body by cutting out natural fats and along with them, fat soluble vitamins. On top of that, my flirtation with vegetarianism and veganism meant that I ate a lot of soy based and grain based foods (and I wasn’t soaking, sprouting, or fermenting them, of course), both of which rob you of vitamins and minerals through the action of phytic acid. To learn more about this, look here and here and here.
I believe that supplements should be whole food as much as possible—meaning no isolated or synthetic vitamins. There are several related reasons for this. The first is that foods contain complexes of vitamins and minerals—they are never isolated. When we isolate them in a lab, put them in a pill, and swallow them, it could cause imbalances. For example, vitamins A and D work together. When you don’t have enough D, you can get vitamin A toxicity. When the A is balanced by D, you can eat a whole heck of a lot of it and never get toxic. Another thing to remember is that there are literally thousands of things in whole foods that we have not identified yet. So, when you eat the food, you get it all. When you take the isolated vitamin or mineral, you get only the things we know about and can isolate in a lab. Also, taking a multi is problematic since many of the things in the multi might be antagonistic toward each other. Are they found together in nature? If no, then maybe you shouldn’t be eating them together.
For myself, I am currently working with a naturopath and taking quite a few supplements in an effort to build back my reserves. I take mostly Standard Process supplements, which are made from whole foods. My intention is to get to the point where I can stop taking them and rely on food rather than pills.
For my kids, the only “supplement” I give them is fermented cod liver oil and butter oil. FCLO and butter oil contain fat soluble vitamins A, D, K, E, and omega 3 fats. This isn’t really a supplement, but a traditional food. I don’t use regular cod liver oil because it is industrially processed and synthetic vitamins are added. Fermented cod liver oil is made through a traditional process. And butter oil is just clarified butter or ghee. It turns out that the vitamin D and vitamin A in cod liver oil work in synergy with the vitamin K2 in grass fed butter. We eat foods containing each of these of course, but eating them together enhances the potency of all three. Read about FCLO here and butter oil here.
Although I don’t give my kids a multivitamin, I do a lot of specific things in my cooking to “supplement” their vitamins and minerals. Here is the short list:
Cooking rice with homemade bone broth instead of water and using bone broth in my cooking whenever I can. This provides lots and lots of minerals—calcium, phosphorous, magnesium, etc. http://www.westonaprice.org/food-features/broth-is-beautiful
Giving them homemade sauerkraut and other fermented veggies at least once a day for probiotics and vitamin C.
Adding about 2 oz of grass fed beef liver anytime I am cooking ground beef as well as cooking liver for dinner whenever Daddy is out of town (he tolerates my kitchen revolution but draws the line at offal). We get vitamin A, B vitamins, iron, choline and a whole lot more. Liver (from any healthy animal, including cod) is like nature’s vitamin pill. It was considered a sacred food and reserved for pregnant mothers and growning children in many traditional cultures.
Raw, grass fed milk, cream, butter, and cheese for calcium, phosphorus, vitamins A, K2, D, and probiotics.
Kefir smoothies for B vitamins, K, D, probiotics, calcium, phosphorus, and magnesium.
Lots of greens, at least three times a week-lettuce, spinach, kale, chard, turnip, collard…etc. for iron, calcium, potassium, magnesium, K1, C, E, Bs, and phytonutrients.
Adding a splash of homemade whey and a raw, pastured egg yolk to a smoothie to add probiotics, choline, and vitamin A.
Cooking with pastured lard for vitamin D.
There are other things I do to enhance the vitamins and minerals in my family’s meals, like being careful to use moderate heat and avoiding the microwave. I also buy local, organically grown produce whenever I can. This means that the veggies will have been grown in healthier soil and be fresher than the produce trucked from across the country or the world in the grocery store. Grass fed, pastured, humanely raised meat and eggs are also going to necessarily contain higher levels of nutrition.
All of these things require more attention, more work, more planning, and often more money. But I can’t think of anything I’d rather spend my time, energy, and money on than nourishing family.
