A rose is a rose is a rose. But is a vitamin a vitamin a vitamin?

Today, one can almost buy vitamins on the street corner. In fact, it is hard to imagine vitamin consciousness being any higher. Millions take one or more vitamins daily.

Is Big Pharma laughing at us? Let’s inquire.

This week the publication “The Week” published a column by a Becca Stanek titled, “I took multivitamins every day for a decade. Then I found they’re useless.” In it, Ms. Stanek told how she had taken a daily multivitamin almost without fail since her middle school days, starting with the old, chalky ones of her youth, to the bulk grainy pills from Costco to the sugar-laced gummy vitamins so popular today. But that changed, she wrote, when her “doctor bluntly informed me that my multivitamins weren’t doing a darn thing for me. Though the idea of getting just a little bit more of all the most important vitamins may seem like a foolproof idea, she informed me that more isn’t necessarily better. Few people have vitamin deficiencies.”

Well, no one has a chemical deficiency but that doesn’t stop physicians from prescribing chemical pills by the handfuls to their patients to “cure” any and all diseases. Nearly 70 percent of Americans are on one prescription drug; more than half take two, and 20 percent of all Americans take five or more prescriptions at a time.

For its part, the Food and Drug Administration’s website says, “There are many good reasons to consider taking vitamin supplements, such as over-the-counter multivitamins.” But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s website says its “Second Nutrition Report on Biochemical Indicators of Diet and Nutrition found 9 out of 10 people in the U.S. are indeed getting enough of some important vitamins and nutrients. These include vitamins such as folate (important for brain and spine development during pregnancy) and vitamin D (needed for good bone health); and trace elements like iron (important to avoid anemia) and iodine (important for brain development during pregnancy).“

So how do we decipher this government argle-bargle? First we must understand that change agents from government, Big Pharma and doctors have created false narratives.

The vitamin business is for the most part a huge deception simply because at least 90 percent of vitamins are synthetics. They are extractions or chemical creations of laboratories. They are man-made and, by strict definition, they are drugs. Most of these vitamins are produced by just a few pharmaceutical companies. They are repackaged and repurposed and renamed to give the illusion of choice.

Pharmaceuticals make drugs, not nutrition. In fact, the modus operandi of the drug cartel is to treat the disease of starvation with drugs instead of with food or nutrition. This is a great deception. Very few understand this.

The sale of drugs for sickness and disease implies that all sickness is a drug deficiency. Drugs are mass marketed to treat people who should be treated with food or nutrition. Sickness and disease is a manifestation of starvation, not a drug deficiency.

On the other hand, natural vitamins or a natural vitamin is a food or a biological enzyme system which comes directly or indirectly from the plant kingdom. The plant kingdom gets its energy and life force from the sun, whereas synthetic vitamins, which are characterized by “potency” are man-made chemicals. A product of chemistry cannot be natural. It is an extraction. It cannot be a whole food. It cannot have or be a synergism. Most people who buy vitamins — like Ms. Stanek — are absolutely unaware of this distinction.

The potency of a natural whole food supplement is not a factor. The synergism is the principle. It is in the synergism of natural whole food supplements that produces life and health.

But most Americans are starving. They eat what I call foodless foods — processed, chemical-laden junk loaded with synthetic sugars, carbohydrates, monosodium glutamate, etc., etc. It is dead, devitalized chemicals made to look good, taste good, addict you and kill you. It’s as empty of nutrition for the human body as Old Mother Hubbard’s cupboard.

So from this sick American population they’ve taken a cross-section of the health status of the American public to establish a baseline for what is enough of a certain nutrient and determined that everyone at that baseline is healthy. But they are not.

And that doesn’t even take into account that the prescription medications rob your body of a number of micronutrients. It’s called “drug induced nutrient depletion” — for example any number of drugs deplete potassium and magnesium levels —  resulting in arrhythmias, hypertension, fatigue and depression. Guess what the remedy for these is? Another drug.

And then there is the creation of the recommended daily allowance (RDA or RDI) — a nebulous, arbitrary and meaningless standard of measurement. The purpose of the RDA hoax is to get the public to accept that the smallest amount you need in order to survive is the gold standard of nutrient health.

A prime example is in the case of vitamin D. The RDA for vitamin D has indeed practically wiped out rickets in the United States. But this is a camouflage for the need of much higher amounts of vitamin D (1,000 to 3,000 units daily even up to 10,000 in the case of TB) as proven therapy for patients with cancer, heart disease, dementia, autoimmune disease, influenza A, chronic pain, depression, gingivitis, the common cold, and dozens of other diseases associated with vitamin D deficiency. But this means natural vitamin D3 (calciferol), not synthetic vitamin D2 (ergocalciferol).

The RDA for iodine is like the RDA for Vitamin D. The RDA for iodine is just enough to prevent goiter. What the public doesn’t know is that in both instances this RDA under-therapy allows for critical disease to creep in, and many times, terminal disease. You need much more of these critical nutrients for not just health, but optimal health.

Of course “orthodox medicine” does not tell you how to achieve optimal health. They simply wait until you complain of something and then use drugs and surgery to try and return you to your original depleted state until something else goes wrong. Is this any way to live?

Standard medicine also screams “toxicity,” as if you can take “too much” of a vitamin. But the truth of the matter is that toxicity will be a long time coming — if at all — for anyone taking natural supplements because their bodies are so deficient. It takes time for our bodies to heal from a lifetime of abuse.

So should Ms. Stanek — and everyone else — heed her doctor’s advice and stop taking vitamins because it’s a waste of time of money?

The best medicine we can take is a proper diet. That’s one consisting of whole foods; vegetables — mostly raw — and small portions of organic or free-range, antibiotic/steroid-free poultry, and wild-caught fish like salmon (which is high in omega-3s). Eat very little beef and pork and make sure what you do eat is grass-fed, free-range and free of antibiotics and steroids. And augment with natural vitamin supplements.