Core 4 Education: Navigating the multivitamin maze.

One of our prime directives at Core 4 Nutrition is to educate people on the power of whole-food supplement support. If you are still taking a synthetic multivitamin, I hope this post will inspire you to do things differently.

When evaluating multivitamin formulas, it’s important to know that the quality of one product’s ingredients can vary.  The inexpensive, mass-marketed one-a-days contain minimal amounts of synthetic nutrients—just enough to meet the government’s RDA or recommended daily allowance of nutrients necessary for preventing disease, not promoting health.  Their more expensive, designer-label counterparts often contain hundreds of vitamins and minerals, all of them synthetic and difficult for the body to use. 

Don’t waste your hard-earned money on products that don’t work.  Learn the basics before you buy.  First, become familiar with the three most common types of multivitamin formulas:

Low Vitamin D: Like smoking a pack of cigarettes a day.

If you've been reading my posts, you already know that an optimal vitamin D3 level will strengthen your immune and metabolic systems while improving your muscular performance and recovery capacities.      

A recent study published in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition has shown that vitamin D3 is even more important because it prevents the onset of chronic disease and actually increases the human lifespan.  Researchers found that raising serum vitamin D3 levels above 50ng/ml in those who were deficient reduced their disease mortality rate by 20 percent and increased their life expectancy by a full five years.

To put these findings into perspective, consider this:  Having a low vitamin D3 level carries the same health and life expectancy risks as smoking a pack of cigarettes every day for 15 years! ...

Core 4 Education: What is a fatty acid?

This will be the first periodic post of a our Core 4 Nutrition Education Series. In these posts,I will be discussing in detail the what, how and why of the four critical factors that we have found time and time again that people need to optimize in order to look, feel and perform at their best.  These factors include vitamin D, omega 3 fatty acids, whole-food derived antioxidants including nitric oxide and whole-food derived micronutrients.  

So let’s get started with our topic for today, what is a fatty acid and maybe more important, why should you care? 

For many years, fats have had a bad reputation because of incomplete or incorrect information. The reality is that fats are essential for life and we should not be afraid of them. To better understand how fats contribute to your good health, it is essential to understand that there are two very different kinds of fats—the good fats that our bodies need and the bad fats that cause degenerative disease....