No one loves me more than my mother; even though there were times during my childhood when I thought she was trying to poison me. Could the chemical aftertaste, belching, and nausea I experienced following the One-a-Day multivitamin capsule she forced me to take along with my orange juice at breakfast have been a warning? She told me vitamins tasted bad, like medicine, so that if a little child found them he or she wouldn’t mistake these pills for candy. By this time in history, medical achievements included the cure of deadly vitamin deficiency diseases, such as scurvy, beriberi, and pellagra. People reasoned, if a few vitamins can cure these ravagers of health, then maybe the answers to cancer or heart disease will be found in supplements too. Why not? This was during the atomic bomb era following WWII when people believed that science would someday soon find the answer to all things important.

Nearly forty percent of the US population takes supplements, with many people spending hundreds of dollars a month. Based on what objective evidence? How many friends and relatives do you know who have suffered from illnesses caused by a vitamin deficiency, such as scurvy from vitamin C deficiency, beriberi from insufficient vitamin B1, or pellagra from a lack of niacin? How about protein or essential fatty acid deficiencies? The truth is none. Now, turn your vision 180 degrees. I’ll ask you the opposite question. How many of your friends and relatives have diseases caused by nutritional excesses—from consuming too much cholesterol, fat, sodium, protein and/or far too many calories? The answer is most of them.

Health problems from excesses cannot be corrected with treatments useful for deficiencies. Have you ever known a person who has lost 100 pounds by taking supplements or cured their arthritis, hypertension, colitis, or type-2 diabetes through vitamin and mineral therapies? I bet you haven’t and neither have I. But every day I have contact with someone, in person or by e-mail, who has achieved such benefits by changing their diet and going for a daily walk out in the sunshine. Thus, there is no “bang for the buck” in believing in supplements.

Better Breathing from Diet

Asthma medication sales were $15 billion in 2008 and projected to reach $17 billion by 2010 with an estimated 300 million people in Western societies suffering with breathing difficulties. Asthma is the active airway constriction (bronchospasm) component of a triad that makes up chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Bronchitis is the inflammatory part of COPD and the end result of years of inflammation is emphysema (fibrosis or scarring).

Certainly our atmosphere is becoming more polluted with irritating chemicals and particles. And, of course, the first actions to take are to clean up your air by stopping smoking, avoiding dirty air, and using air purifiers. The other factor you potentially have complete control over is your diet, which I believe is the main cause of the escalating epidemic of lung diseases we are now experiencing.

An unhealthy diet will increase a person's susceptibility to known causes of lung disease, such as allergens, tobacco smoke, infectious agents, and air pollution. One of the best examples of the importance of diet and lung health is demonstrated by the low incidence of lung cancer among Japanese cigarette smokers. The risk of lung cancer in the United States is at least 10 times higher than in Japanese living in Japan despite the higher percentage of smokers among the Japanese. Smokers of Japanese decent living in the US have the same incidence of lung cancer as do the rest of Americans. These findings point to the importance of the differences in the diets followed in Japan and the US. The starch-based (rice and vegetable) diet followed by most Japanese smokers allows the body to defend and repair the damages from smoked tobacco far more effectively than does a diet of fat and protein (meat and dairy products); the American diet. 

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