Shooting straight to the source

Q: I notice that many of your articles refer to vitamin and mineral injections. Does that mean oral vitamins don’t work as well?

Dr. Wright: Oral supplements certainly help your overall health, however, progress is often much slower than it is with intravenous nutrients. There are several reasons why.

Even when digestion is optimal, as it usually is in a young person, no nutrient is 100 percent digested and then assimilated. The “food” your body assimilates most efficiently is, unfortunately, the worst one for you — refined sugar. But most nutrients, especially minerals, are assimilated at less than 40-50 percent efficiency. Quite often, you only assimilate 20 percent or less of the essential nutrients from what you eat. And this is if your digestion is operating completely up to par.

In most cases, digestion isn’t optimal, which further compounds the problem of absorbing or assimilating nutrients from your food. As we all get older, the efficiency of digestion and assimilation almost always declines, as does our vision, hearing, strength, and many other functions. This happens even when there aren’t any specific digestive or absorptive defects, and, of course, it’s aggravated by specific conditions such as low stomach acid (hypochlorhydria), weak pancreatic digestive function, low or absent (because of surgery) gallbladder function, and other digestive/absorptive defects.

Not only is your own stomach working against you, but the foods you’re putting in it probably aren’t helping much either. Even if you avoid packaged, processed foods, the things you do eat may not be as nutritious as they should be. Unless most of your diet is organically grown, the nutrient content of nearly any food you eat is considerably less than it was for the same food a century or more ago.

And on top of all that, hidden food allergies, sensitivities, and intolerances, estimated to affect over half of us, also interfere with nutrient assimilation to variable degrees.

So all of these factors are standing in the way of you absorbing — either from foods or supplements — all the nutrients your body needs to be healthy and disease-free. But when nutrients are injected intravenously or intramuscularly, they bypass those roadblocks and go straight into your blood stream where they can be delivered immediately to the areas that need them.