Make Nutrients Work for You
Before we can talk about the nutrients that we need one by one, there is a conversation we need to have first. We first have to talk about how our body absorbs these nutrients.
The danger in talking about nutrients one at a time is that we tend to believe if you have a deficiency, we work to fix the deficiency by taking a supplement or implementing foods that are high in that nutrient and everything will get better.
I wish it were that simple.
This is where the tenets of wholism come into play.
Unlike the common belief that doing XYZ = great outcome, wholism sees the whole picture. In other words, just because we take a vitamin B12 supplement doesn’t mean that we are going to automatically increase energy, lose weight, detox better, etc.
There are many more things to consider besides just supplementing with B12. Let me be clear hear, I’m not saying B12 is bad because any of you that know me know I preach B12 night and day…but it doesn’t work in a vacuum.
When we are looking at our bodies through the lens of wholism, we understand that there are other factors that can interfere or enhance the ability of nutrients to be helpful.
It is really easy to look at this in a very linear fashion and think that each nutrient has its job and its place and once it’s there it will perform these duties.
In reality, each nutrient can’t be placed in one specific category based on its function. Each has many jobs in multiple body processes. Without the right balance of them, their effectiveness is reduced.
So, in that vein, I want to start here and talk about the things that can factor into whether your body absorbs the nutrients you’re taking in, whether your body can actually utilize them, and what we can do to help your body be most effective.
Let’s start with the simple things that can interfere with our body’s ability to use the nutrients that we take in.
Genetics
One of the most basic things we can start with is genetics. Some of you have explored your genetic data with me and we have talked about genetic mutations that can cause certain nutrients to not be absorbed or utilized. In this case we may need to give higher doses or go through a “back door” to mitigate the mutation.
We also can’t ignore that each person has individual needs. Your body may just plain need more Vitamin A, for example, than your neighbor.
You might have some things called subclinical changes, like the beginning stages of insulin resistance, that may require additional resources that will not show up on a lab result as abnormal.
Or you might have a chronic condition that makes it impossible for your gut to breakdown a particularly nutrient. The best example of this is pernicious anemia where the gut cannot break down B12 whether it’s in food or supplement, so a person has to do injections.
The most sinister way of interfering with a body’s use or absorption of nutrients is the myriad of medications that are prescribed without thought of what they might do to the body processes that help with nutrient efficacy. This is a real frustration of mine which I will not get started on here, but I have seen this over and over again in clinical practice.
Bioavailability
It is a common misconception that the type of nutrient you get doesn’t really matter as long as you’re taking it.
A great illustration of this is magnesium. There are 11 different kinds of magnesium. The most common form in the supplement aisle is magnesium oxide. Magnesium oxide does not break down easily in the body, yet it is readily available at big box stores and pharmacies.
On the other hand, magnesium glycinate is the most absorbable form of magnesium and is readily available to the body. This is important because magnesium is one of the most critical minerals for our body and one that we are commonly deficient in.
I’ll save the magnesium discussion for its own post but this is just an example. Would you rather have something that is 2% bioavailable or something that is over 50% bioavailable for your body?
On the same line of thinking, the constitution of the supplement can either hinder or help. I’m going to go back to magnesium. Often you will find magnesium glycinate in very large horse pills as a hard pressed capsule that is very hard for your gut to break down. If the gut can’t break down the pill before it leaves the body, it’s basically useless.
Quality Matters
Another thing to consider is the quality of the supplement. I have had many patients come in with a grocery bag full of supplements that they are taking with almost all being bought at big box stores or even well-known pharmacies. Quality matters. Lab results often show that the person is deficient in the same vitamins they are taking because the quality of the supplements is very poor. In this case, because the of that poor quality, the vitamins are not getting absorbed, so all you really have is expensive urine. Not to mention the effect on the gut and the liver of taking so many pills.
When we look at helping your body to break down and absorb nutrients whether in food or supplement, it is important to consider where that nutrient comes from. For example, iron from plants is not as utilized in the body as iron from animals. This doesn’t mean that you can’t get iron from plants such as spinach, black beans or raisins, but plants cannot supply all of the different forms of iron that the body needs.
Balance
Some nutrients need to be balanced with others. Calcium needs magnesium, zinc, copper, boron, copper, phosphorus, and manganese to allow the body to take up the calcium. Another example is iron absorption is helped by the presence of vitamin C.
There are nutrients that act as balancers to each other but can easily go too far the other way. The example I always use is calcium and magnesium being inversely proportionate… when one is high the other is low. As an ICU nurse, I was taught never to hang them together in an IV because they would cancel each other out. While calcium and magnesium need each other for checks and balances, they can actually hinder the absorption of the other if taken together.
Gut Health
Gut health is the final factor to discuss in this category. If your gut does not have a good microbiome, if it is inflamed, if it is leaky, or if it is full of candida or other infections it will be very hard for the gut to breakdown anything, let alone absorb it. Gut health is critical to not only absorption of nutrients but energy levels, mental health, and brain function. I will go into this deeper in a future post.
Stress
I’m going to end with probably my favorite topic. This is probably the biggest factor in our society that interferes with our ability to absorb and that is stress. See, you knew I had to put this somewhere!
None of us wants to think about how stress affects things in our body because we are too busy being stressed out, maybe even anxious.
But what we know is…when you sit down to the table, or worse yet don’t sit down at all, and eat, your body cannot break down or absorb anything. Please hear me on this!
When we are under stress, we decrease the ability for nutrients to be absorbed, we increase the excretion of them, we increase deficiencies, we increase cortisol levels (a whole new level of issues), we increase insulin resistance, and we increase inflammation. And this is just the start of the picture of stress and its effect on the gut.
Many studies show that you can eat the most nutritious foods cooked in the healthiest ways and be completely nutrient deficient because of the stress you feel when you are eating.
When we slow down and become calm before we eat we increase digestive enzymes in the saliva, we help the breakdown of protein in the stomach, and we increase the blood flow in the intestines which enables us to breakdown, absorb, and utilize vitamins minerals and other nutrients.
How we feel when we sit down to eat completely affects what our body does with the food and the nutrients in it. So, please be slow and mindful when you eat (and trust me…this is the pot calling the kettle black!)!!
And that’s all I have to say about that. For today.
I know this is a lot of information that I have only touched the surface of, but it will be a good start to our conversations.
As we get going into each of the nutrients and what they do for our body and what happens when we don’t have enough of them, please remember these thoughts.
Each of the nutrients we’re going to talk about are critical to the body and I’m going to explain why and how we can improve them.
But my hope is that you don’t forget this post. The supplement you’re taking or the foods you’re adding or taking out are not the whole picture.
Again, wholism is a huge part of nutrition and health.
With much love ,
2 Comments
Karen A Unrue
Wow, that is amazing. It is everything I’ve heard you say over the last 20 years but now I can actually reread it and understand it better
Thank you
Bobbi Schuldt
Great information!! I will keep this and reread it hoping it will finally sink in 🙂 Especially the stress part! You covered a lot, I’m looking forward to learning more,.