Discussing Supplements, with Oliver Patrick
Nutrition has become a fractious and overly complicated landscape. Pillar nutrition goes back to the three key principles of food, nourishment, digestive support, and metabolic support, all underpinned by delicious food people want to eat.
The nutrition gap describes the difference between the levels of nutrients the average person, eating a reasonable diet, is obtaining from food, and those nutrient levels identified as being needed for optimal functioning in the population.
A supplement can serve to fill that gap between the nourishment in food and the nutrient demands of an individual. As the name implies, supplements (dietary / nutritional) are any product that aims to ‘supplement’ the diet with nutrients that could potentially be missing or are required at heightened levels.
The evidence for supplementation varies wildly between different nutrients for different conditions. The use of folic acid is well established during pregnancy, as is vitamin D for a multitude of bone and general health conditions. However, new forms of supplements, including adaptogens (nutrients to balance stress) and nootropics (nutrients to drive improved brain function) are embryonic science and broadly untested in large scale trials. Talking about supplements inevitably brings together the proven and the unproven under one overarching topic.
Supplement can be broadly divided between those supporting sport or athletic performance such as Creatine or protein powders, and those backfilling a dietary deficiency / heightened nutrient need like vitamin D or vitamin C, classed as dietary supplements. The question of usage must always revert to the goal of the individual, the background physiology, the current nutritional habits, and the underlying health of the person.
The pillar approach to supplementation is an evidence based and pragmatic. There used to be very little concern around throwing high dosages of vitamins and minerals into supplement capsules and assuming they did no harm, until studies showed an increased risk of cancer in a group of smokers who took high dose vitamin E capsules. In this instance we had evidence where taking high volumes of supplements wasn't just not beneficial but could be actively harmful, and that heightened the need for informed, judicious, and personalised supplementation.
You can walk into any health food store and see walls and walls of individual supplements in different formats available at different dosages. It is become a confusing marketplace. Pillar seeks to take a simplified view of supplementations and in doing so our preferred philosophy is to use supplements made from whole food, negating the risk of excessive dosages and increasingly the likelihood of quality absorption. This type of supplement is called food state or food grown and it is a new and exciting concept. If we think of traditional supplements as being manufactured in a pharmaceutical way with the chemical formula of the vitamin being reproduced in a manufacturing plant. Then food state is different from this in the fact it is nutrients grown as food and in doing so they contain the vitamin as it would appear in nature or the food matrix as it is known.
Supplementation is both robust and exploratory, often within the same aisle of the same shop, and requires a personalised guide to ensure safety, effectiveness and context against the overarching health and wellbeing goals of the individual.
Basic rules:
Buy supplements from reputable suppliers - they should have gone through quality assurance
Check the data to see if the specific nutrient has been tested in clinical trials with a cohort of people that match their gender, age, condition, other.
Look for warnings and side effects - for example, people with certain health conditions may be excluded from taking high dose nutrients.
Stick within recommended doses
Review progress – note any changes in subjective or objective health and wellbeing markers to determine effectiveness.
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