You were reminded of it as you cinched up that new Christmas belt that was your size last year.

 

And again when you bent over to lace up the freshly unwrapped sneakers and realized high-tops would have been an excellent idea to avoid having to reach quite that far.

 

OK. We all need to get back in shape. It’s the same resolution every year, but this time let’s not savage ourselves and make it our own Day of Atonement; let’s just get to it – shall we?

 

Let’s also keep it simple. My own favorite personal philosophy. Unless you actually enjoy knotty and labyrinthine procedures – like building the space shuttle – there’s really no reason this whole supplement thing needs to get complicated.

 

How about a basic supplementation plan in three quick installments. This week: vitamins; next week: omega fatty acids, followed by beneficial flora – bacteria we need – in week three. Hang on. Here we go.

 

Vitamins. There are 13 of them. Take your pick, real or…unreal – as in synthetic.

 

Grab your bottle of Flinstones there on the counter. Notice it contains “vitamin C.” You then skim to the ingredients and find it does, in fact, contain sodium ascorbate, which many of us recognize as a form of vitamin C.

 

Not quite so fast, tough guy. Sodium ascorbate is a buffered form of ascorbic acid, which on some level over the years we relate to vitamin C. But neither ascorbic acid nor sodium ascorbate IS vitamin C. Sorry to have to break that to you.

 

Ascorbic acid is a component of vitamin C, but if you only ingest ascorbic acid, you’re eating what amounts to the outer wrapper of the chemical nutrient we label vitamin C.

 

Vitamins are tiny bio-chemical complexes, the whole of which are greater than the sum of their parts. Without any one part, the nutritional effectiveness is diminished or lost. Think about it. Do you want the outer ring that holds everything that is vitamin C together or do you want the whole enchilada? 

 

Most of the vitamins found on shelves are of the synthetic variety. Man-made chemical isolates (as in outer ring only) of vitamins that occur naturally. They are cheap to manufacture, market and sell, and they are...well, cheap.

 

Frankly, when your body gets to a synthetic chemical that purports to be some portion of a vitamin or nutrient, it has no idea what to do with it. And many times, it does absolutely nothing with it, not because it doesn’t want to help you out but because it can’t.

 

The alternative to the man-made vitamin variety is the natural, whole food vitamin. It is essentially exactly what the name implies. Whole, complete food.

 

The pure, non-chemical manufacturing process for natural vitaimins involves removing the water and fiber from vitamin-rich plants and then culturing and fermenting the result into a predigested natural food. In addition to recognizing and using the nutrients, your body doesn’t have to supply any “missing links” from its own stores.

 

You can find a number of natural whole food vitamin selections here. One of the first things you’ll notice is that whole food vitamins are more expensive. A number of factors are at work here.

 

Distilling natural food and nutrients is a more expensive process. The natural vitamin manufacturers are also outside the major marketing chain of the big three chemical suppliers to the world’s vitamin makers: Hoffman-La Roche, Ltd., a subsidiary of Swiss drug giant Roche Holding AG; BASF AG of Germany and France’s Rhone Poulenc.

 

Those three companies control over 75 percent of the world market for human and animal vitamins. Talk about your economies of scale. It all boils down to the old adage you get what you pay for.

 

So chuck the man-made chemical pills called Flintstones and OneADays (both made by Bayer) and get on a good, solid, natural vitamin your body can use. 

 

It’s a good start and won’t hurt at all – not nearly as much as all those situps you’re committing to right about now. Put down that cupcake, cupcake.

 

Next week: Omega oils.