Why Supplement Programs Fail

I was recently speaking to a coach who regularly shares the Core 4 Nutrition Program concept with his clients.  He told me that while many of his athletes were enthusiastic about getting started, others were skeptical—one of the most common symptoms of MLM (multi-level marketing) product let down.

I also spoke to three athletes who simply didn’t “believe” in taking supplements, citing a “healthy diet” as a panacea for their nutritional needs.

Unfortunately, the nutritional supplement market is too often tainted by expensive, yet ineffective, products that invariably over promise and under deliver.  After having spent a large sum of money on magic solutions that never really materialize, many users of nutritional supplements become disillusioned.

But those who have adopted an anti-supplement stance—based on a bad experience, disbelief, or misinformation—are missing the proverbial boat.

As a physician specializing in sports performance nutrition, I know two things:  Even the “healthiest” and most well-balanced of diets fall short when it comes to satisfying the human body’s nutrient needs.  And that the correct combination of the right supplemental nutrients taken in the proper amounts can have a dramatic impact on improving both cellular health and functional fitness.  During the past few years, I have amassed thousands of laboratory results to support these conclusions.

Nutritional supplements can work.  And they can work very well.  When they don’t, there’s a reason—or reasons—why.  Typically, a supplement program will fail when:    

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....