Should I buy packaged foods with added nutrients?

Food manufacturers want to control what matters to you. Every single food and food product in the store has a marketing team working hard to promote the brand. The net effect: when you walk down a grocery aisle, it's like hundreds of voices talking to you at one time (and you thought a household with two to five voices could get crazy).

It's overstimulation, and we need to take our brains back! Let's look at some considerations: Even if a manufacturer has added something to a food to achieve a higher nutritional level than what exists in nature, it begs the question: is the form of what's added absorbable? Can we absorb that much?

Should we? What's the rationale? Just because manufacturers can and do add nutrients to a food product, does that action have other consequences, such as competing with what's naturally in the food?

For example, increasingly higher calcium in the absence of magnesium can create an imbalance of these two minerals that ultimately detracts from your body's energy-making machine. If we give too much attention to one vitamin, can it create a "conditional deficiency" of another? (Ask your kids: if you give more attention to one, how does the other feel?) B vitamins work best together, so if we over support one B vitamin, we can create a condition whereby the lack of others at the same level creates unhealthy by-products and dysenergy (dysfunctional energy) issues in the body.

What about getting 100 percent (or more) of your daily needs in one food -- is that a smart goal? At first it seems great because it means we don't have to think about getting any more throughout the day, but we should think about consuming nutrients all day long, especially from whole-food sources. A glass of orange juice at breakfast with 100 percent of your daily vitamin C needs doesn't mean you should shun a real orange or other vitamin C-packed whole fruit later on as part of a snack.

And what about ingredients added to foods that naturally wouldn't contain them? For example, our yogurt may not supply us with a lot of fiber, but it gives us high-quality protein plus pre- and probiotics -- the ingredients to support lean body mass, a healthy balance of hormones, digestive wellness, and heightened immunity. We can increase fiber by adding fresh fruit or ground flaxseed on top.

Yogurts that add synthetic or processed fibers may be less than ideal, but moreover, they are unnecessary when you rely on nature's fiber sources.

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