Why a pill is no substitute for a balanced diet

KEEPING fit is a high priority for Katharine Crowe-Mai, with the Sydney bar manager finding time to exercise almost every day.

But when the 21-year-old began taking on more graveyard shifts about a year ago, she felt her body needed an extra boost.

"I work out a lot and I was worried I wasn't getting everything I need from my diet. Even when your diet is balanced, you can't eat everything you're supposed to eat every day," she said.

"Because I work long hours and night shifts, I was always tired so I started taking vitamins to supplement whatever I wasn't getting (from food)."

Crowe-Mai's justification for her vitamin use is shared by millions of others across the globe. Indeed, it's been one of the health industry's biggest growth areas for a decade.

But their popularity notwithstanding, most dietitians argue that a healthy, balanced diet means vitamin supplements are not necessary.

"There are certain times and places where supplementation is needed but for the majority of people, most of the time, vitamins are totally unnecessary," according to Bondi-based sports dietitian Naras Lapsys.

Spokesman for the Dietitians Association of Australia Trent Watson, who has a PhD in Nutrition and Dietetics, agrees.

"As far as supplementation, in the context of someone with a good, healthy, well-balanced diet, they're unnecessary," he told The Weekend Australian. "There's no second-best to food. Whole foods, whether they be fruits and vegetables, wholegrain breads and cereals, or your meat and dairy, provide the nutrients in the best quantities and combinations for optimal human performance."

The Australian Institute of Sport also adheres to this belief - the in-house dietitians and nutritionists prefer the athletes to avoid supplement use where possible.

"Coming from a nutrition background, we will always promote eating well above taking a tablet," AIS senior sports dietitian Liz Broad said. "Food has so many complex ingredients that you can't actually physically replace all of that in a tablet form. There's still lots we don't know about what food has in it and what it provides for us in terms of its health-containing properties." And if you're too busy to eat well?

Broad thinks "too busy" is just an excuse. "It's not that difficult to get a good-rounded, balanced diet and it's also actually not that expensive. Certainly with athletes, there are other things that foods provide in terms of fuel and recovery and those sorts of things, she said.

"Their performances rely on a good-balanced approach to their diet - putting energy into that is just as important as putting the time and energy into training."

Lapsys says many athletes - particularly the more elite - take vitamin supplements as preventative health measures and to relieve oxidative stresses caused by placing greater strain on the body than a normal person does.

"Even if they're very fit, they can be prone to being unwell quite a lot because their immune systems are having to work very hard," he said.

Blackmores Director of Education Pam Stone argues that dietary surveys have shown most Australians are not consuming the range of nutrients necessary to prevent a range of illnesses.

"Supplements do not replace a healthy diet but as research is showing a lot of us seem to not be getting the nutrients from our diet that we should so we're not always achieving a balanced diet."

Stone also points to clinical trials as evidence that nutritional products can help delay the onset of chronic age-related conditions.

Some argue that the effectiveness of vitamin supplements is just in the mind, but Stone says the fact that Australians are spending more than $3.5 billion each year on complementary medicine suggests otherwise.

Watson says that even if a placebo effect was the case, it would not necessarily be a bad thing.

"If there is a belief that it is having a positive outcome, generally it will regardless of the physiological effect that it has because the mind is a wonderful thing."

There is a general consensus among health experts that vitamin supplementation can be highly beneficial for those with medical conditions, such as iron deficiency, as well as the elderly and pregnant women.

"By the time we start reaching our 60s, our stomach acids don't work quite as effectively as they've had in the past, so there's a bit of an argument to take a multi-vitamin supplement as a bit of an insurance policy," Lapsys says.

As for Crowe-Mai, she isn't sure if her intake of vitamin supplements is having a positive impact on her body, but says she will continue "just in case".

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/sport/why-a-pill-is-no-substitute-f...