What are the most important nutrients in the diet?
Spoiler alert: even the best scientists and doctors do not know what compounds make up the majority of our food.
Can you believe we have no idea what makes up 90% or more of the food we eat? How is this possible? And what does this mean for prioritizing supplements that have the most important nutrients for our health?
Nutritional Dark Matter
Scientists call this concept Nutritional Dark Matter: there are tens of thousands of molecules in our food and we only know what a couple hundred are.
We know broad categories like macronutrients and micronutrients: fat, protein, carbohydrates, vitamins, and minerals.
These are the main metabolic components, but don’t take into account the activator components, like polyphenols. Other compounds are essential modulators of processes within the cell.
What is represented on labels and what we understand is only the tip of the iceberg!
Most dietary supplements fall short – they are missing some of the most important nutrients in the diet
Now that we know we aren’t even close to identifying the majority of the compounds in our food – what does that mean for most of the dietary supplements out there?
First, we have to look at how most dietary supplement are made.
- A company identifies the nutrients it wants to include in a supplement. Sometimes this is only one nutrient, sometimes it is 20 or more in a multivitamin.
- The company sources these synthetic (lab-made), isolated nutrients, and combines them into one pill.
When you read the ingredients, it can look quite impressive that so many nutrients are included!
However, these synthetic supplements are missing the wide variety of critical nutrients we have yet to discover in food. Most dietary supplements are based on the less than 1% of nutrients we have identified.
How do you make sure you are getting the most important nutrients? Whole food supplements!
When we formulated Cellemental Complete, we selected the ingredients because they contained some impressive and unique nutrients that are lacking in modern diets.
For example, sea cucumber has nutrients that have not been found in any other food sources. An example is fucosylated chondroitin sulfate (FCS), a unique polysaccharide with extensive scientific study.
We know that nutrients act in synergy with, and are dependent upon, the other nutrients and compounds present in food. A great example is collagen which does not act in isolation.
That is why we formulated a whole-food dietary supplement – so we are not missing all the important nutrients we have left to discover.
What are some of the nutrients in Cellemental Complete?
The whole-food ingredients in Cellemental Complete have a long list of nutrients, including:
- Vitamin A, anthocyanins, alpha lipoic acid
- Bioactive B vitamins, BCAAs
- Vitamin C, collagen, carotenoids, creatine
- Vitamin D
- Ellagic acids and ellagitannins (precursors to Urolithin A), essential fatty acids and macronutrients
- Fucosylated chondroitin sulfate (fucoidan), flavonoids
- GLA, GAGs, glycine
- Hesperidin
- Iron
- Vitamin J (choline)
- Kaempferol
- Leucine (and iso-leucine)
- Magnesium, methionine
- Niacin
- Omega fatty acids (3,6,7,9)
- Phospholipids, polyphenolics, peptides
- Quercetin, CoQ10
- Rutin
- Sulfated polysaccharides
- Tocopherols, tocotrienols
- Uridine
- Valine
- Whole food cofactors
- ‘Xtras’; precursors to and production pathway support of many cellular nutrients including urolithin A, NAD+, and glutathione; support of essential cellular processes including methylation, energy generation, and cell membrane dynamics.
- Zeaxanthin.
But even this impressive list is a small fraction of what we have left to discover!
So, what are the most important nutrients in the diet? We probably don’t even have a name for some of them yet.