Food vs. Supplements: Can You Get Enough from Your Diet?

In theory, a nutritional supplement is intended to be used precisely as the word is usually defined — as a supplement to your ordinary diet. When considered exclusively in this way, it is understandable why a multivitamin is a true supplement, as it can reinforce your ordinary intake of vitamins and minerals just in case there are some gaps in your nutrition plan that are causing those needs to go unmet.

On the other hand, as our collective understanding of optimal nutrition continues to evolve, the supplement market has expanded to deliver nutrients in quantities that would stretch the limits of human comfort if they needed to be acquired through everyday food sources. 

To be clear, this doesn’t apply to every supplement, but there are some prominent examples that reveal how daunting it would be to achieve clinical levels of many popular supplements through regular eating.

Creatine

People who have followed the evolution of creatine from when it first achieved notoriety as a supplement are probably astonished by how it went from a controversial “natural steroid” to a nutrient that is prescribed for everything from depression to the alleviation of post-menopausal maladies. 

In its early days of prominence, creatine was discovered to be so potent as a strength and endurance booster that the only thing that saved it from a ban was its presence in nearly every form of meat, leading its researchers to laugh that you “can’t ban food.” While this is true, it was seldom emphasized exactly how much food it would take to acquire the amount of creatine used in supplements.

You would need to endure the formidable task of consuming well over two pounds of beef or another creatine-rich animal source every day just to match the five gram maintenance dose of creatine. That’s discouraging enough, so heaven help you if you were required to complete a 20-gram loading cycle using only unprocessed meat sources. 

Plenty of people think they would be happy eating more than 10 ounces of steak at every snack or meal until they actually have to do it, so we should all be thankful that creatine comes in a convenient powdered form that can be easily added to a shaker bottle. 

Caffeine

Assuming that you wanted to receive the same amount of caffeine that’s contained within a standard pre-workout formula, you would usually only have to eat about 30 individual green coffee beans to do the trick. This is a surprisingly low amount in the minds of most people, which might leave you wondering why it wouldn’t be easier to simply snack on raw coffee beans like they’re peanuts if the net effect is the same.

The truth is, the outcome from eating raw coffee beans is vastly different from consuming refined caffeine in another form. First, one of the minor side effects will be that your body will be exposed to the full laxative effects of coffee, which are substantially greater when coffee beans are in their unfiltered, solid form. 

Second, coffee beans contain a great deal of acid, the majority of which is eliminated during the filtration process of drinkable coffee, but chewing and swallowing pure coffee beans would expose you to a high risk of gastrointestinal problems, including acid reflux, and stomach irritation.

In short, you’re far better off consuming caffeine in processed forms than you are straight from the source, at least if your intention is to exercise while your body’s alertness has been heightened. Otherwise, there would be an elevated risk of having your workout interrupted by gastrointestinal duress.

Magnesium

Long considered an essential nutrient due to its participation in a host of physical reactions ranging from energy regulation to muscle signaling, magnesium has skyrocketed in interest due to its powerful and underrated role as a natural promoter of restfulness, and helping to prepare the body for sleep without the use of hormones or chemicals that are often accompanied by harmful side effects. 

Thanks to this, you might be asking why it would be necessary to consume supplements of an essential mineral that is present in so many ordinary food sources. Well, the reason for this is simply that magnesium is not as plentiful as it is presumed to be. 

With 420 mg usually set as the daily benchmark for magnesium intake, you can evaluate the magnesium content of the foods commonly advertised to contain a lot of the nutrient. When you do, you’ll realize that they contain far less magnesium that you’d expect them to. 

For example, it takes three densely-packed cups of cooked spinach (180 grams), to safely pass the 420 mg mark. If that’s too much, you could simply eat 14 bananas, or an entire six-ounce container of almonds. You’d probably be left exhausted and irritated by the sheer effort required to eat all of this food, and in the latter two cases you’d also be adding more than 1,000 calories to your daily intake solely for the sake of acquiring the necessary amount of a single mineral. This makes magnesium yet another nutrient that is far simpler and less expensive to acquire in clinical doses from a supplement.

Collagen

The fact that collagen is becoming widely sought after as a supplement to elevate the health of skin and joints might lead you to think that collagen is easily acquired through food that you would commonly find on your dinner plate. In reality, whether or not you receive any regular exposure to collagen in appreciable volumes is dependent on your personal choices in selecting food, and even then, the collagen quantity is unlikely to be substantial.

If you regularly consume bone broth, you might be well on your way to approaching the amount of collagen peptides usually contained in supplements, which averages out to around 10 grams per cup. Outside of this, collagen peptides can be downright scarce. 

You would have to eat more than two pounds of salmon just to receive a paltry two grams of collagen peptides. Meanwhile, chicken skin is similarly touted as a reliable source of collagen, but you would have to eat half a pound of skin just to receive two grams of collagen peptides from it. Then again, at a toll of nearly 900 calories, you’d probably rather find your collagen a different way. 

Fortunately, collagen supplements have been optimized to the point that you can acquire more than 20 grams of collagen peptides in a single scoop, and without having to consume absurd amounts of ingredients that you would never eat under any other circumstances. 

Supplements are essential for certain health outcomes

Nutritional supplements have made it so easy to consume clinical doses of key nutrients that it becomes easy to overlook just how close to impossible  it would be to acquire those nutrients if they weren’t powdered or encapsulated for our convenience. 

With this understanding in mind, use supplementation as an opportunity to spare yourself the aggravation and discomfort of trying to acquire all of these sought-after nutrients the old fashioned way.

Summary

1. Many supplements provide clinical doses of nutrients that would be nearly impossible to comfortably consume through everyday food items.

2. Acquiring a daily maintenance dose of creatine would require the daily consumption of two pounds of beef, while consuming loading-phase doses would require five times this amount.

3. The caffeine content of a pre-workout formula would require you to eat only 30 coffee beans, but this amount can produce considerable digestive discomfort.

4. To acquire the recommended daily ration of magnesium, you would need to eat the equivalent of 14 bananas or an entire six-ounce container of almonds. 

5. To even acquire 10 percent of a clinical dose of collagen peptides, you would have to eat two pounds of salmon or half a pound of chicken skin.

6. For these reasons, consuming these nutrients in supplement forms is much safer, convenient, and inexpensive that finding it in whole-food items.