Real Food or Supplements?

Ritesh Bawri

20 Feb 2024 — 2 min read

BreatheAgain

Real food or supplement?

This is a topic I get extremely torn over. Every day, the people I meet ask me, "What supplements should I take?"

In a decade of working to reverse lifestyle diseases, I may have met five people who asked me which real foods I should add to my life.

Which is really strange when you think about it because all supplements come from food after all. But I digress.

What should you do? Eat food or take a supplement?

Unequivocally, eat real food. All the time. As many diverse kinds as you can get. Culture and religion permitting, eat all kinds, vegetarian and non-vegetarian.

There is no morality in food; it is surivival. If we started moralizing food ten thousand years ago, you would not be reading, and I would not be writing. We ate what we got.

Having said that, supplements are not a terrible idea. You just have to be judicious about what and why.

For example, almost everyone I meet asks me to add B12 and D3. They are severely deficient in our diets, and the lack of sunlight makes it worse.

I asked my parents to take COQ10, or coenzyme 10. It is an enzyme that helps retain memories and starts to diminish in the human body around the age of forty.

I take creatine because I am vegetarian and I work out regularly. Creatine helps build muscle. I stop taking it the minute my workout is not regular.

I have asked people to take magnesium, electrolytes, and so on. But in each case, it was for a specific need, under a specific circumstance, and typically for a specific period.

I would never recommend someone see something on social media or have a casual conversation with a friend and start to supplement.

But most people do. It is easy and seductive. I feel like I have checked off my action list for how to fix my health. I feel less guilty about my hedonistic lifestyle.

But real food is what the body needs. A supplement, as the name suggests, can only supplement real food at best.

Reach out to me on twitter @rbawri Instagram @riteshbawriofficial and YouTube at www.youtube.com/breatheagain

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