Against Suppliments

A few days ago I listened to Episode #81 of the Regenerative Agriculture podcast. The host is an Amish farmer and entreprenuer named John Kempf whom I listen to regularly and have really grown to respect as a profoundly articulate and knowlegable person in the field that his podcast is named for. In my shotgun approach to learning about regenerative agriculture (which for me includes permaculture, food forests, etc) - begun just after the last presidential election - it has become clear to me that I would do well to continue dialing in to his show. The episode just mentioned featured Fred Provenza, Professor Emeritus of Behavioral Ecology at Utah State University. I specifially looked up Provenza due to an interview I heard on Wise Traditions (another go-to podcast that advances the research of Dr. Westen A. Price) in which one of the guests vocalized his opposition to a pet peeve of mine: suppliments. Provenza's book Nourishment came up, in which the Wise Tradition's guest said (as I understand it) that Provenza's research showed that animals given dietary suppliments eschewed the real nutrient when available in the wild. In other words, if the animal could get the natural nutrient from plants it might forgo it due to its dependence on the suppliment. In Provenza's interview with John Kempf he seemed to say as much. Is this a problem? To my way of thinking it is. I have never been a pill popper. Even taking an aspirin for any reason was a foreign thing for me. The exceptions only occured if I had a cold or felt I was coming down with one, then I hit the Vitamin C bottle. And that was about it. Everywhere we turn nowadays everyone is pushing suppliments. Many of them may be good and needed, such as (I suppose) Omega 3, but many others are undoubtedly scams. Nowhere are suppliments probably pushed more than in the health coaching arena, a field in which my wife is working to be certified. Suppliments should not be necessary for a healthy society. Full stop. If we can't grow or otherwise get from nature the necessary nutrients our bodies need without buying Dr. Fad's suppliments then there is a problem. And there is a problem, for sure. It's possible many of the suppliments on the market today may be neccessary for a significant number of people because we have decimated our ability to grow or get from nature food that is not poisoned, manipulated, or otherwise tainted in one way or another. But why would animals turn their noses up at nature's nutrients after they have been conditioned to taking man's suppliments? And what does that mean?

Hopefully Fred Provenza's book will tell me.