Supplements. You knew this was coming, didn't you? By now, you should be eating more fruits and vegetables, drinking more water, getting sunlight, and eating more whole grain foods. You should also be reading labels on food to avoid health-robbing ingredients.

The next step on your road to real health is supplements. And I'm not talking about one multivitamin a day either. Exactly what you take is up to you, but you need to get in the habit of taking quite a few pills or powders every day. In this post I'm going to lay out the case for supplements.

You might be thinking, why supplement? I'm eating good food now, grains, beans, fruits and vegetables. Yes, and that is a great start. However, two factors work against you being able to get all the nutrients you need just from the food you eat.

The first is soil depletion. Our farmers do produce a lot of food. However, the minerals in the soil, that the plants take up through their roots and then pass on to us, have been depleted. In medieval times, farmers would let a field lie fallow for one or two growing seasons. This allowed the soil to replenish itself. These days, this is not feasible. The plants do grow, of course, due to the use of either chemical or organic fertilizers.

These plants grow and are healthy and good for you to eat. However, they often lack the minerals you need or have reduced amounts of them. So, to get all the you need, you would need to eat a lot of them. This is the second factor. In prehistoric times, people walked and gathered and ate, all day. They took in a lot of calories and expended a lot.

You however, have other things to do. It has been estimated for you to get all the nutrients you need on a daily basis, you would have to eat 10,000 calories a day. You'd be eating all day and you'd obviously gain weight. This is not practical at all in today's world.

Supplements get their nutrients from whole foods. Vegetables, microalgae, grain, fruits, and other healthy foods are dried and combined, either in powder form or pill form. This makes it relatively easy to get the nutrients you need, without having to spend all day eating.You take a few supplements and you have what you need for your body to work properly.

About the Author
Barbara Pfieffer writes about gaining real health on her blog, Real Health.