Orthomolecular medicine is the restoration and maintenance of health through the administration of adequate amounts of substances that are normally present in the body. Dietary supplements at high doses as part of medical therapy have been controversial, but the evidence suggests that they play a significant role in prevention and treatment of diseases as well as protection from accelerated ageing that results from oxygen free-radical damage, inflammation, and glycation.
The aging process is typically accelerated as a result of free radical exposure, frequent or chronic inflammation, and toxic exposures (such as to heavy metals, or industrial and agricultural hydrocarbons, or toxic chemicals unwittingly bought into the home in common household and personal care). Reversing this process or slowing it down is one goal of orthomolecular therapy, along with treatment of health problems. So it’s a two-step approach, just as we say in the Savvy team talks “Wellness It’s Not That Hard”.
It’s hardly new news, when you realise that Dr Weston Price was saying this back in the 1930’s. Orthomolecular nutrition, in contrast to “eat the right food groups” nutrition, emphasises the use of supplemental vitamins, minerals and other essential factors in amounts that are higher than those recommended by the government-sponsored ‘dietary allowances.’ ” says Abram Hoffer MD, PhD and Andrew Saul, PhD in “Orthomolecular Medicine For Everyone: Megavitamin Therapies for Families and Physicins“.
As we assert in our Wellness It’s Not That Hard talks, Dr Pauling (the only person in history to be awarded 2 unshared Nobel prizes) said last century when he coined the term ‘orthomolecular medicine’: “You can trace every sickness, every disease and every ailment to a mineral [a nutrient] deficiency.”
At the turn of the last century Dr Weston Price trailed the world studying the affects of the western diet an lack of nutrition had on native cultures, as they took up a western diet. His conclusions and recommendations were shocking for his time. He advocated a return to breast feeding when such a practice was discouraged by Western medicine. He urged parents to give their children cod liver oil every day. He considered fresh butter to be the supreme health food, and margarine to be toxic to the body.
He warned against:
- pesticides
- herbicides
- preservatives
- colorings
- refined sugars
- vegetable oils
in short, all the things that modern nutrition and agriculture have embraced and promoted the last few decades. The obvious conclusion of Price’s research is that for humanity to survive, it must eat better. And the foods it must eat must be whole, fresh, and unprocessed. His book, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration: A Comparison of Primitive and Modern Diets and Their Effects (1939) was unfortunately largely ignored.
Der Price quotes Dr. Alexis Carrel, who in his treatise “Man, the Unknown” states: “Medicine is far from having decreased human sufferings as much as it endeavors to make us believe. Indeed, the number of deaths from infectious diseases has greatly diminished. But we still must die in a much larger proportion from degenerative diseases.” Carrrel continued “ … In my search for the cause of degeneration of the human face and the dental organs I have been unable to find an approach to the problem through the study of affected individuals and diseased tissues…[it seemed] that the undesirable conditions were the result of the absence of something, rather than of the presence of something.
There is plenty of modern literature that examines supplements that have documented significant beneficial roles in medical therapy. If you haven’t read A Supplement A Day Keeps The Doctor Away’ by Dr Peter Dingle, then contact your Savvy Team support person for a half-price copy. It contains thousands of recent research studies proving the efficacy of nutritional supplementation.
The evidence abounds that shows benefits in diabetes, cardiovascular disease, hypertension, congestive heart failure, age-related deterioration of brain function and vision, and immune function, as well as other age-related health problems.
Dietary supplements, including vitamins, minerals, essential fatty acids, amino acids, flavonoids, herbs, and accessory food factors, are among the most valuable and safe substances for prevention and treatment of serious chronic and acute diseases associated with mortality, as well as everyday health problems that cause discomfort and disability. It is important to take adequate doses for their full benefits. Because they prevent deficiency diseases at low doses, they have acquired a reputation for being necessary only at these low levels. As a result, many physicians ignore the value of much higher doses that are useful for therapeutic purposes and protection from age-related degeneration.
For the most benefit from dietary supplements, it is important to ignore the RDA (recommended dietary allowances) levels that are found in food and most common dietary supplements and focus on the research that shows the benefits of appropriate doses, which are often much higher than the RDA.
Educating The Public
We ask for your help in educating the public, by helping us share the information we know is making a difference in peoples lives. We ask for your help in paying it forward. The Savvy Team leaders are committed to education and information. Why not host an in home “Wellness It’s Not That Hard” talk for your friends and family, and at least pass the information on to those you care about. Word of mouth is now known to be the most successful way to share important information with those you care about. By working together we are creating an entirely new approach that benefit individuals and communities for the greater social good.
The Savvy Team were encouraged to discover that The Centre for Chemistry Education (CCE) at Miami University in Ohio was in 2013 awarded a Science Education Partnership Award from the National Institutes of Health for a project called Fighting with Food: Battling Chemical Toxicity with Good Nutrition: explaining why good nutrition is essential to battle environmental toxicants. This is the message we have been sharing for over two decades.
The goal of this five-year project is to develop middle and high school classroom instructional materials that explore the role of nutrition in reducing risk from the many thousands of everyday environmental contaminants, SLS, lead and PCBs being just a few of the less dangerous ones. This is a fantastic acknowledgement of a worthwhile program educating the youth of the dangers that the World Health Report identified in 2012.
For more on the closest Wellness It’s Not That Hard talk, contact your Savvy Team support person, or email info@savvy-team.com
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