The macronutrients role is to provide calories and energy. Macro means large thus your body needs a lot of these nutrients for growth, metabolism, and for other body functions. There are three macronutrients, carbohydrates, protein, and fat.

Carbohydrates are the macronutrient and are the body’s main source of fuel for the anaerobic muscles, all of the tissues and cells in our body can use glucose for energy. Carbohydrates are also important for intestinal health and for the central nervous system, kidneys and the brain to function properly. Carbohydrates also provide increased transportation of protein to the muscle cells which aids in muscle growth.

Your best sources of carbohydrates can be found in vegetables, beans, nuts, seeds and cottage cheese. Fruits, vegetables and whole grains help the body eliminate waste, as these are high in fiber. Foods like grains, potatoes, fruits, and yogurt also provide carbohydrates. The next macronutrient is protein, which is important for growth, tissue repair, and immune function. Great sources of protein are found in eggs, meats, poultry, fish, meat substitutes, cheese, nuts, legumes, and in smaller quantities of vegetables.

When these types of foods are ingested, our bodies break down the protein that they contain into amino acids or better known as the building blocks of proteins. Protein that comes from animal sources contains all the necessary amino acids needed. Plant sources of protein, on the other hand, do not contain all of the essential amino acids. Last but certainly not the least is the macronutrient, fat. We all try so hard to lose fat, yet fat is essential for normal growth and development, energy fat is the most concentrated source of energy and absorbing certain vitamins like vitamins A, D, E, K, and carotenoids.

There are three main types of fat saturated fat, mono saturated fat, and poly saturated fat. Saturated fat is found in foods like meat, butter, lard, and cream. It is important to reduce but not eliminate saturated fat in your diet while increasing mono-saturated fat which is found in foods like olive oil, avocados, and nuts. Foods containing these fats have been shown to decrease the risk of developing heart disease. Poly saturated foods are often nonexistent in American diets. Poly saturated fats are found in foods like flax seed, fish and currant seed oil. These fats are important for reducing chronic inflammation, cholesterol and supporting the nervous system. In general the majority of fats you eat should be two thirds mono with the remaining one third mostly poly and even less saturated fat. None of these fat groups should be completely omitted when maintaining a healthy diet.

Trans fat which you can identify on the ingredient list as hydrogenated oil is used as a preservative in baked goods, snack foods, fried foods, and margarines. Even small amounts of hydrogenation are toxic and have no place in the human diet.

Do not forget to drink plenty of water, get adequate sleep, and exercise daily in order to make sure your body is taking full advantage of all the great and nutritious whole foods you are so generously supplying to yourself.

Macronutrients are fundamental for normal body function. Once you’ve incorporated these, finding a good quality whole food supplement rich in fruits, vegetables, grains and more can be the next step in achieving good health.

2. Whole Food Supplements
Are There Really "Whole Foods" In My Whole Food Supplement?

In our fast paced society of instant gratification, often we take for granted that we get what we pay for. In one aspect, this is exactly why supplements in particular have become such a popular choice regarding the goal of so called, "healthy living". We often assume pretty packaging with impressive words on the label such as, "whole food supplements" that in fact there are whole foods inside. So it begs the questions what are whole foods, and can they really be in a whole food supplement?

Long before health food stores and aisles upon aisles of products with seemingly no rhyme or reason; there was the good old-fashioned saying, "eat your fruits and vegetables". The origin of this wonderful advice stems from the generations before who lived off the land, when all human food was whole food.

Today, whole foods are foods that are defined as unprocessed and unrefined, or processed and refined as little as possible, before being consumed. Whole foods do not typically contain added ingredients, such as salt, carbohydrates, or fat.

Some examples of whole foods include unpolished grains, beans, fruits, vegetables and non-homogenized dairy products. Simply put an "unpolished" grain occurs when the cereal germ, endosperm, and bran are not stripped from the grain, leaving the whole grain in tact. In fact, the United States Food and Drug Administration defines "whole grains" as cereal grains containing the bran, endosperm and germ of the grain.

Whole unrefined foods such as whole grains, dark green and yellow orange-fleshed vegetables and fruits, legumes, seeds and nuts contain high concentrations of antioxidants and fibers. In addition, these foods have numerous other phytochemicals that can guard against chronic diseases.

Read the list of ingredients on the label of your whole food supplement. Are there various fruits, such as blueberries and cherries? Are there leafy green vegetables such as broccoli, Brussels sprouts and spinach, just to name a few?

Eating whole, unprocessed, unrefined foods is vital to your overall health in more ways than can possibly be listed here. So, when you are thinking about whole foods in a supplement, shouldn’t they be inside the bottle? After all isn’t that why you are taking a whole food supplement in the first place?

3. Whole Food Vitamin Supplements
Whole Food Vitamin Supplements Fact or Fiction

Almost all of the vitamins on the market, even those claiming to be “whole food vitamin supplements” are not natural or from food at all.

Conventional vitamins are isolated or synthetic forms of very specific components which are standardized and incomplete sources of nutrients. The dosages found in conventional vitamins are much higher, often thousands of times higher than what you would find in food. Synthetics and isolates are very cheap to make, take up little space in a capsule or tablet, are standardized and have stable shelf lives. For these reasons, they are convenient for vitamin manufacturers to use and they are anything but natural.

Another reason these synthetics and isolates are so widely used is that FDA labeling requirements are drastically skewed to be in favor of them, making it very difficult for anyone to try to produce a supplement using natural ingredients. In some cases, a label claim cannot be made based on whole food ingredients unless there is a standardized source added. These labeling requirements are very crippling for most companies making a truly natural supplement where the whole foods are actually the source of nutrition in the product. Vitamin C is an exception to this law and as a result there are several supplements on the market where the vitamin C content is naturally occurring, such as in Raw Source Organics Daily Vitamin C.

The laws governing supplements in the United States are not only skewed away from natural vitamin sources they are also quite arbitrary. This is most problematic for consumers who take it upon themselves to actually read a label. Labeling requirements make it very difficult to distinguish between natural and unnatural sources of vitamins. Some sneaky companies use this to their advantage and will spike yeast with synthetics, in their “fermentation or culturing process” then sprinkle foods in too. They can then legally call themselves whole food vitamin supplements.

Believe it or not, laws governing vitamins in this country are some of the most lax in the world. In fact many ingredients commonly used in American supplements are outlawed in Asian countries. There are pros and cons to this situation. On one hand a lack of regulation allows for people access to alternative medicines and protocols that might not be available find if one is depending on the FDA and the big drug companies for ultimate access. At the same time, a lack of regulation makes it very easy for manufacturers to put anything they want to on the shelves regardless of integrity or consequences.

A good example of this is the use of the words “proprietary blend,” on the label. It’s perfectly legal for a supplement company to use this term rather than list their actual ingredients. For all you know the proprietary blend could be saw dust and Kool-aid mix.

There was a movement started less than 10 years ago by the few truly natural whole food vitamin supplement companies out there pushing for the FDA to implement a Naturally Occurring Standard. The hope was that additional standards would allow nutrient claims to me made from naturally occurring sources of vitamins and also that there would be Daily Recommended Values established that are based on food not just standardized vitamins as they are now. This movement apparently never caught on but there are a couple of things you can do as a consumer to find truly whole food supplements.

Keep in mind the following label alerts when shopping for whole food vitamin supplements:

1) If a company brags that they are “whole food created, cultured or fermented” it means they spike their food with standardized vitamins.
2) If the label claims give you higher than 100% DV the sources are probably not from food. (The exception to this could be vitamin C which can be found naturally occurring in relatively high amounts.)
3) If any of the ingredients are listed as “Proprietary blends,” you don’t really know what is in there.
4) If a product lists dozed of vitamins and dozens of foods they are probably using standardized vitamins with a tiny sprinkling of fruits and veggies to make the product look like it’s packed with nutritious food. Think about it. There is only so much space in a tablet, how much food could you actually be getting?

Raw Source Organics Daily Immune Complex is a great example of how whole food supplements can be done right. The nutrients are naturally occurring which means you get the whole-complex of vitamins that comes in the whole foods and at dosage levels found in food. There is no culturing process necessary. In reality, because Raw Source Organics contains whole food sourced vitamins (peels and all) there are actually hundred of nutrients naturally occurring in them… even if the FDA does not allow them to be claimed on the label.