Optimum health is not found in a bottle

Excellent reply and I agree with everything you said.  Thanks to you, Uny and other wise souls, I have learned much here at CZ regarding nutrition and supplementation - and as time has gone by I have converted more and more to whole food derived supplementation for those supplements I do take.  While I take a few items for specific issues, such as GTF chromium, red clover complex, silica, reasonable D3 (during the shorter months) and transdermal magnesium, I get most of my supplemental nutrition these days from alternating three items:  the wonderful organic vitamin, mineral and nutrient complex intraMAX, the Schulze type superfoods powder with added acerola cherry you take and some sea vegetable caps.  I think that alternating those every third day pretty much assures that I am getting close to the optimum amount of nutrients when combined with my mostly healthy diet - lots of vegetables, fruit, some meats (more organic chicken and fish than beef), organic eggs, raw goats milk, blackstrap molasses, organic honey, etc.  Plus, it stretches each of those three items out much further while hopefully avoiding the body becoming "dependent" upon any one item. 

The whole idea of the body taking what nutrients it needs and passing on the rest is mostly a myth.  In many instances it has been used to explain the bright yellow or orange urine one gets after taking a typical off-the-shelf multivitamin, such as One-A-Day. Centrum or Flintstones.  Those cheap synthetic vitamin products cause colored urine because they are poorly absorbed.  That is because they are made up from synthetic coal-tar derived and other petro chemical vitamins and crushed rock minerals that have not been pre-digested by plants.  The body knows the difference and in any event is not nearly as capable of absorbing them as it is the natural vitamins and plant derived minerals we get from whole foods. Most of those products don't contain anywhere near the optimal amounts or variety of nutrients to begin with In the first place and what they do contain is poorly absorbed.  Thus the colored urine and quite a bit of truth in the old adage about store-bought vitamins mainly giving you brightly colored pee.

It is notable that virtually every one of the Big Pharma financed and/or influenced studies which show little or no benefits from various vitamins and minerals, and even some which supposedly demonstrated possible harm, have used synthetic vitamins and crushed rock minerals (or worse,  minerals taken from mining operations).  Besides not studying whole food derived nutrients, such studies also continue to make the same mainstream medicine mistake of not recognizing the body as a synergistic whole and simply dumping substances into the body without regards to the other items it needs for proper absorption and utilization.

One other point:  just as the body can and does underabsorb nutrients, it can also over-absorb nutrients and other herbal items - and that is especially true when the body is not functioning optimally to begin with due to not being properly nourished and taken care of.  Food for thought for those who try to address their health with a bottle full of pills, whether those pills are "natural" or synthetic supplements or mainstream unnatural drugs.

Optimum health is not found in a bottle.