My point is that there is a big difference between preventing a gross vitamin deficiency disease, and using vitamins to create optimum functioning.  Any sick person or anyone with a health complaint needs to improve their overall functioning in any way that won’t be harmful over the long term.  Vitamin therapy can be an amazingly effective adjunct to dietary reform and detoxification.

Some of the earlier natural hygienists were opposed to using vitamins.  However, these doctors lived in an era when the food supply was better, when mass human degeneration had not proceeded as far as it has today.  From their perspective, it was possible to obtain all the nutrition one needed from food.  In our time this is unlikely unless a person knowingly and intelligently produces virtually all their own food on a highly fertile soil body whose fertility is maintained and adjusted with a conscious intent to maximize the nutritive content of the food.  Unfortunately, ignorance of the degraded nature of industrial food seems to extend to otherwise admirable natural healing methods such as Macrobiotics and homeopathy because these disciplines also downplay any need for food supplementation.

Vitamins For Young Persons And Children

Young healthy people from weaning through their thirties should also take nutritional supplements even though young people usually feel so good that they find it impossible to conceive that anything could harm them or that they ever could become seriously sick or actually die.  I know this is true because I remember my own youth and besides, why else would young people so glibly ride motorcycles or, after only a few months of brainwashing, charge up a hill into the barrel of a machine gun.  Or have unsafe sex in this age of multiple venereal diseases.  Until they get a little sense, vitamin supplements help to counteract their inevitable and unpreventable use of recreational foods.  Vitamins are the cheapest long life and health insurance plan now available.  Parents are generally very surprised at the thought that even their children need nutritional supplements; very few healthy children receive them.  A few are given extra vitamin C when acutely ill, when they have colds or communicable diseases such as chicken pox.

Young people require a low dose supplement compared to those of us middle-aged or older, but it should be a broad formula with the full range of vitamins and minerals.  Some of the best products I have found over 25 years of research and experimentation with young people are Douglas Cooper’s “Basic Formula” (low dose and excellent for children) and “Super T Formula” (double the dose of Basic Formula, therefore better for adolescents and young adults), also from Douglas Cooper Company; Bronson’s “Vitamin and Mineral Formula for Active Men and Women” and Bronson’s “Insurance Formula.”  “Vitamin 75 Plus;” and “Formula 2” from Now Natural Foods are also good and less costly.