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Q. When should I expect to see results from my supplements?
A. Great Question! You ask that question every time you finish with a product and are confronted with the choice to buy it again or not. How do you know if it’s working? How do you know if it’s worth the money or not?
To a large extent, it depends upon you. Nutritional products are not drugs. They don’t act like drugs; they don’t generate results the same way drugs do. What they do is support the body’s own functioning, maybe also giving it the tools it needs to repair itself. This is generally a longer process than that involved with consuming a pharmaceutical, so it should take time before you see results. It also may be a more long-lasting benefit, because for results to show up, that generally means the underlying condition may well have changed. That is a different process than just treating or managing the symptoms, and so can and should take longer.
Let’s get a little technical about it:
This is the "high tech" diagram we are going to use – a straight line. In this diagram, the line represents the Continuum of Health. The left side of the line represents negative health, or disease. The right side of the line represents positive health. Somewhere between negative health and positive health is a point we’ll call the Stasis Point. It’s in between the two. There may be lack of symptoms of any disease state, so we aren’t experiencing ill health, but we also aren’t experiencing abundant good health, either. That would be further to the right. This Stasis Point is sort of the point where good health and bad health meet, if you’d like to think of it that way.
We actually have a term for maximum negative health. We usually call it Death. That is represented on our chart by the dot on the end of the left-hand side of the line. There is no end point for positive health that we know of. How healthy can you get? We all have seen people who seem 10 to 20 years younger than their chronological age. We also know there are stories of Saints and Yogis who have lived for hundreds of years. While we have no way of verifying whether or not those reports are true, they have persisted in popular mythology for thousands of years. You can even find such reports in the Bible. So, positive health could extend beyond what we ordinarily think, so we’ll mark that end with an arrow.
Here’s the thing about noticing results -- it all depends upon where on the continuum you fall. Let’s say you are on the negative side of Statis Point. We’ll even be kind to you and say you aren’t experiencing any pronounced symptoms of deficiency. And we’ll choose just one area to look at, let’s say the complex of B vitamins. B vitamins are nutrients that the body needs in order to be able to convert your food into energy, so if you’re not getting enough, it’s easy to understand why you would feel your energy level was down. Let’s say that’s you. Adding even a tiny amount of B vitamins, enough to get you from the negative side of the Stasis Point to the positive side, could seem as big as the difference between night and day! With exactly this kind of example, people have stated that their lives had changed!
Now, let’s say you are already well on the positive side and you take exactly the same dosage of the same B complex. Would you notice anything? The contrast between ill health and positive health is not there. You are looking at the difference between good health and more good health. That's more of the same thing, and how noticeable is that in the short term? Not very.
Several years ago, some researchers at UCLA published a study on Vitamin C intake and longevity. No one had looked at the connection between the two before. They went to the same studies that were used to establish the Recommended Dietary Amounts (later the Recommended Dietary Intakes), in which the dietary intake of more than 10,000 people was studied and then followed up with 10 years later. After factoring out things that might interfere with the results, they took a look to see how Vitamin C effected longevity. They found that it did, primarily in terms of heart disease, and because women do not have the same risk as men do until after menopause, it affected the population of men more than the population of women. Taking their results and then projecting them out over a lifetime, their thumbnail conclusion was that women who supplemented with vitamin C lived an average of 2 years longer than women who didn’t, and men who supplemented with it lived an average of 6 years longer than men who didn’t. Pretty interesting.
For this discussion, however, it was the findings between groups that were the most interesting. After dividing the subjects into gender divisions, they then separated them into 3 groups. Group 1 did not eat well (meaning not enough vitamin C in their diet to get the RDA of 60 mg) and did not supplement. Group 2 did eat well (averaged 130 mg of vitamin C daily from food sources, so more than double the RDA) but did not supplement. Group 3 also ate well (averaged 140 mg of vitamin C daily from food sources, so also more than double the RDA and just slightly better than the good eating but non-supplementing Group 2) and did supplement with additional vitamin C. (There was no representation in the study of how much vitamin C they supplemented with, just simply that they did.) What they found was that each group outlived the other. Group 2 on average outlived Group 1, and Group 3 on average outlived both of the others. Now, mind you, Group 2 consumed more than double the RDA from food sources every day. They were miles away from a deficiency state. There was no consideration of scurvy in this group whatsoever (the primary disease state associated with vitamin C deficiency). On a day to day basis, you would bet that they felt no difference whatsoever. However, 10 years later, there were people alive in Group 3 who might not have been had they been in Group 2. At that point, there would have been a massive difference in how they felt!
So, when will you see results? It depends. If you are in a deficiency state, then getting enough of what you are not getting enough of could be very noticeable. It’s kind of nice when that happens because it puts to rest any concern you may have about whether or not this thing you are taking is working. The price for that degree of certainty is that you have to start off in a deficiency state and may have become run down in the process. If you are already on the good health side of the equation, then boosting your health further towards Optimal Good Health is a very good thing and something that you would want to do. Who wouldn’t more abundant good health and enhanced vitality and have it last longer, but you do it at the price of not having the same degree of certainty your less-well counterpart. The price you pay is that you have to take it on some degree on faith that it’s working. You won’t have the same contrast the other person has. More good health on top of good health is a very real thing, but not as noticeable as good health to someone who hasn’t been experiencing it.
That’s the story behind seeing results. Whenever someone says they started taking a product and noticed a huge shift in their energy, look at the list of ingredients to see how it was spiked. Almost without exception, such reports come from products that have been spiked with stimulants of one sort or another, and it is the stimulants that have been creating the feeling of more energy the person reported, and not the nutrients. Nutrients don’t work that way. MSM is one of the few that genuinely offers relief for many users within a few days; it seems to be somewhat unique in that regard. As for other nutritional products, they tend to take time to deliver their results.
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