Wrestling with the Errors of Our Teachers

I purchased a bottle of Solgar's Vitamin E 400 IU, 250 count soft gels.  It is a brand that I've trusted through the years, in part to the influence of a "friend" who touted the virtues of vitamins in general.  I am beginning to realize that vitamins extracted from their food source are not the best source of nutrition or supplementation.  I've believed that with vitamins I will get extra amounts of life-sustaining nutrients.  Maybe, but at a price, and I don't mean the sticker price on the bottle.  No, I mean a chemical price.  It's not a little upsetting, too, that guys like Dr. Mercola and Mike Adams make their living off of certain vitamins for this condition or that complex.  People only want to feel better.  They want heightened performance, better thinking, more flexibility, greater range all in the service of greater productivity.  And vitamins have been sold as the ticket on that train.  Well, they're wrong.  

Back to the Solgar Vitamin E, I called Solgar to ask if their product contained any soy.  The noise about soy is bad from a nutritional standpoint.  It negatively affects sex hormones--testosterone and estrogen.  Anyway, the operator at Solgar, who asked for the bar code number on my bottle (maybe as a way to track me as a customer), told me this: that Solger vitamin E contains:

highly refined soy that removes the protein from the soy,

hinting that the protein is the allergen that causes the hormonal alterations. 

I'm not the most qualified to evaluate a nutrient but I am getting there.  So far, I haven't committed to supplements long-term; as yet, I don't have the discipline or the desire for a long-term commitment.  At some point, I just get tired of taking pills.  I want to believe in the benefits of Vitamin E because I have experienced benefits.  All it took me was one incident to convince me of the miracles of vitamin E.   I had a tiny wound on my wrist years ago.  It was healing but slowly.  So I took a Vitamin E capsule and broke it open and spread the oil from inside the capsules on top of the wound, saturating it in vitamin E.   Though the results weren't immediate, within a day or two my skin became smooth with the wound's scar having dissolved almost 50%.  I could not believe my eyes.  I'd heard of the benefits of Vitamin E, but it is another thing to see them.  

A friend of mine takes a lot of Vitamin E, probably up to or more than 1,600 IU per day.  When recommendations came out about 8 years ago that 400 IU was now the preferred dose, a point that I shared with him, he almost went ballistic, insisting that high doses were the way to go.  He is and was an admirer of Linus Pauling, who advocated high doses of vitamins to treat chronic conditions.  Art Robinson proved Pauling was wrong on the point of mega dosing being an effective way to treat cancer.  But who knows?  Maybe my friend who takes 1,600 IU of Vitamin E experiences great relief, maybe even a sedating relief from internal pain.  I don't know.  I didn't want to press him.  His health is his business; his and the writers he consults and trusts.

Bromelain has been shown to reduce scarring.

For the overall health of your skin, B3 is the preferred nutrient. 

Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride on Fermented Foods: "Lactic Acid . . . Is One of the Most Powerful Antiseptics."

This was interesting.  Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride asserts that what is going on in multiple sclerosis is your body's own immune system trying to purge the mercury and lead that has embedded itself inside your fatty tissue along the nerves, your myelin sheath, and in your muscles.  She makes a compelling case for the benefits of yogurt and other fermented foods.  

She explains how the fermentation process in foods works to our benefit:

Mother Nature is extremely wise and extremely kind. It populated all organic fruit and vegetables, the dust on our soils, and all plant matter with Lactobacilli. The fresh cabbage leaves, if it’s organically grown (not the one from chemical farming), will be covered in Lactobacilli—lacto-fermenting bacteria. You don’t need to add anything. You just chop it up. Add some salt in the initial stages. (The salt is added in the initial stage in order to stop putrefactive bacteria from multiplying.) Then as the Lactobacillus stop working and start multiplying, they produce lactic acid. That’s why they’re called Lactobacillus. That’s just lactic acid.

If you look at the research in lactic acid, it is one of the most powerful antiseptics. It kills off lots and lots of bacteria.... So as the lactic acid starts producing, it will kill off all those putrefactive and pathogenic microbes and preserve the food. It’s a great preservative... A good batch of sauerkraut can keep for five to six years without spoiling or rotting, as long as it is covered by its own juice.