[quote]andersons wrote:
How hard have you looked for said evidence?
There’s plenty of evidence. “Conclusive” is always going to be elusive given the complexity of the body and the nature of individual differences. But this isn’t a court of law here, it’s my own health and optimal function.
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Well, reasonably hard I suppose. I was a lot more up to date on nutraceutical findings back in uni, but I like to browse nutritional journal articles because there’s a lot of groundbreaking stuff being discovered on a near daily basis.
With a few exceptions (resveratrol, some catechins and a couple others) I haven’t found much of anything that indicates to me, beyond a reasonable doubt, that a proven positive physiological effect can be gained by taking a concentrated extract that can’t be gained by consuming a reasonable amount of the actual fruit or vegetable its taken from.
If you find some, though, please post it. I’d be interested to know.
Not really a fair comparison here. Unless you’re swigging back gallons upon gallons most water you drink serves a function…rehydration and at the very least, waste excretion. Once you exceed a certain limit of intake for a compound, it becomes waste itself; nothing more.
I can understand and respect what you’re trying to do here…“have your bases covered” if I’m reading correctly, but I am of the opinion that nature itself holds the keys to cover these bases and most of them involve intelligent nutrition rather than chemically extracting/encapsulating and peddling at GNC.
I’m in the pharmaceutical industry and I can say that a good percentage of our “blockbuster” drugs have come not from the work of scientists in a lab, but rather, from so-called “primitive folk medicine” of isolated ethnic groups (often, of South American). That blood pressure medicine your grandfather takes? Probably comes from bark. The antibiotic that saved a relative’s life? Likely from a poisonous mushroom.
The point of this is that I’m not inherently against extracting effective compounds…in the case of things that 99.9% of humans would never come in contact with or physically be able to eat…but having so much nutrition in the vegetable section of a supermarket, I have to wonder about the purpose of dissecting and bottling something that’s near perfect already