I’ve sometimes asked bewildered customers, “Why do you want to take a vitamin supplement?” The answer usually translates as some feeling, either real or imagined, that the food they are eating is not supplying what they need. And given the way food is grown these days and the way people are forced to eat quickly and on the run, it may often times be true that they are lacking in necessary nutrients. For many Asian cultures, digestion and proper assimilation begins when you start to assemble the food you will eat for a meal — the colors, the smells, the little tastes of one ingredient or another. These days, most peoples’ meals are assembled for them and little time is given to the pleasure of eating. In my humble opinion, vitamins are best found in a balanced diet of mostly organic foods. But if your 50+ hour work week doesn’t offer you the pleasure of leisurely meals made from scratch and your income doesn’t allow for organic food, then some sort of daily vitamin is probably not a bad idea. I would first try a Food-Based vitamin. This means that the vitamins actually come from food rather than extracted in a lab from food or chemical sources. The body recognizes them as food and thereby assimilates them better. There isn’t the need to pack the vitamin with 5,000% of your daily needs of some vitamins, because more of the vitamin is available. There isn’t that “dark-yellow urine” syndrome from some of these “mega-vitamins” that give you way more than you can use in one day simply so that an ample amount gets absorbed.

We carry several different brands of whole food vitamins, including Megafood, New Chapter, Bio Life Naturals, and Rainbow Light Organics.