The Importance of the FAT-soluble Vitamins – Real Food Wednesday

“How can we ever expect to be healthy when we’re shunning the foods our bodies are built for?”

Today for Real Food Wednesday, I want to point you to a series on the fat soluble vitamins from Scott at Modern Forager. Earlier posts in his series cover why they’re important, but in the one I’m linking to below, he tells where to find them in our foods…

Here’s an excerpt:

“How can we ever expect to be healthy when we’re shunning the foods our bodies are built for? These foods come with the vitamins our body needs, but we’re told to avoid them. Instead, we are told to increase our consumption of processed foods that are enriched or fortified with vitamins, invariably vitamins that are in their least-usable state (such as D2 rather than D3 or beta-carotene rather than retinyl palmitate). And then there’s a little thing of importance that these are FAT-soluble vitamins. How much of that added vitamin A & D do you think you get from fat-free or reduced-fat milk? Did you see how much vitamin K is left in skim milk? (I’ll wait while you go look again.)

Is it any wonder we see such ill health throughout the population, from the elderly who expect declining health as part of “aging”, to the youth, those who should be in the prime of their lives, full of energy and vigor? Does it seem right that 1-in-4 school-age children are wearing glasses or contacts? We have children aged 6-19 with the arteries of 45-year-olds. Something isn’t right here! Yet we keep taking this vitamin or that and adding it to some new Frankenfood and putting a big label on it that says, “Look how good for you I am! I have the vitamin-du-jour in me!” Worse yet, there are companies being paid (PAID!) to endorse this stuff as healthful (see: American Heart Association).”

My conclusions for our family:

Scott’s posts (& the posts he linked to) are a great reference for which foods to be sure we’re getting in our diets. They also solidify even more my belief in how important cod liver oil is, and the importance of eating plenty of butter, milk, cheese & eggs (among other things). We all love crispy pecans, but it looks like we should also eat more crispy almonds for vitamin E, as well as some of the other foods on the vitamin E list. Overall, we’re doing pretty well, but there’s always plenty of room for improvement.

Read Scott’s post: We NEED the FAT-soluble vitamins!

How does it look for your family? What are you eating enough of? What do you need to add in?

We hope you’ll jump in now, too, for our REAL FOOD WEDNESDAY blog carnival:

Be sure to take a look at Cheeseslave/Ann Marie’s REAL FOOD WEDNESDAY post.  Notice we aren’t picking certain topics anymore, just share whatever is on your mind related to REAL FOOD!

• IF YOU DON’T HAVE A BLOG, please comment!
• IF YOU DO HAVE A BLOG, use “Mr. Linky” below to add a link to your post on this topic, keeping these rules in mind:

1. PLEASE be sure to add a link in your post back to this post, so your readers can benefit from all the ideas, too. Also this helps out the other participants who are hoping to get more traffic to their blogs. Call it “blog carnival etiquette“.
2. Do not link to your home page, only link to the specific post. (Otherwise later when new readers find this post and go to your link, they won’t be able to find what they’re looking for.)
3. Leave a comment so we know to look for your new link, especially if you add it later. This way we’ll know to look for it – new comments have email notifications, but new links don’t.

• More info on healthy fats - which ones are and are not on the list
• Healthy Bread Choices
• Rookie Tips
• Many more topics & recipes along the right in the blue section

Subscribe in a reader

Learn more from the COMMENTS BELOW - join the conversation!