Brandy wrote:Supplements are tough on us. I think sometimes they are too concentrated. They can be contaminated. I think the little pellets going through are gut are just tough to digest.
Brandy wrote:Example in my life. I can't tolerate tumeric/curcumin or ginger as supplements but I can tolerate them in foods as a spice. I think the supplement form is too concentrated for me to digest.
This is a very good point. The human digestive system was designed to get nutrition from whole food, where nutrients are available in groups. In many cases, the combinations of nutrients may offer synergistic effects that are not available in concentrated supplements. Humans evolved eating real food for over 2 million years. When food laboratories came along, some researchers decided to make an arbitrary assumption that if food was nutritious for human health, then the nutrients in food were the most important parts of food and isolating them and using them as supplements should be even better than eating whole food. At least that was the gist of the sales pitch that the food chemistry divisions of food manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies sold to the medical community and the general public when they realized that there was a fortune waiting to be made by exploiting that idea. And everyone fell for it. 
But in the real world, eating real food provides far better long-term health than trying to get nutrition out of a bottle. The digestive system can extract nutrients from real food much more efficiently that from concentrated supplements. This is the reason why when supplements are taken, the "doses" have to be so much larger than the amount of nutrients provided by real foods. And what happens to all those excess nutrients that are not absorbed from the supplements? They have to be removed from circulation by the liver or kidneys and purged from the system, often overloading these organs because they were not designed to do that on a full-time basis. I'm not saying that supplements are always bad — when they are the only option, then they are obviously better than nothing. But they should not be viewed as a primary source of nutrition in the long run unless the digestive system is permanently compromised to a degree that food is no longer a reliable source of complete nutrition. Whenever possible, getting nutritional needs from food is far superior to taking supplements.
That said, there are a couple of exceptions to that general rule. Vitamin B-12 and folic acid seem to be absorbed more efficiently from the right type of supplements than from whole food, especially by individuals who have methylation issues.
GAC's post brought to mind the fact that I forgot to mention something in my earlier responses. According to Chris Kressor (holistic medicine practitioner), magnesium deficiency is often misdiagnosed as fibromyalgia. And magnesium deficiency has been shown by researchers to be associated with asthma, and magnesium affects the severity of asthma symptoms (symptoms are much worse when magnesium is deficient). Yes, magnesium can cause the same aches and pains as fibro. Antibiotics also deplete magnesium. And about a year ago when my magnesium deficiency finally became severe (after repeated antibiotic treatments for dental work), I would often have symptoms that seemed just like asthma, except that there was no wheezing. I hadn't had asthma for almost 50 years, but when I was a kid I had severe asthma problems, so I'm familiar with the symptoms. So now I wonder if I might have been magnesium deficient when I was a kid.
Tex
Some members here seem to tolerate them OK, and some even insist that they help. But I can personally attest that they aren't beneficial for everyone. After that experience, I wouldn't touch one with a 10-foot pole. 
