Earlier this year, Canadian researcher Bonnie Kaplan and New Zealand researcher Julia Rucklidge wrote an article for Mad in America about the search for magic bullets in treating mental illness.
A few years ago, Kaplan and some fellow researchers reviewed studies conducted on the role of vitamins and minerals in treating mood disorders. They found dozens of studies dating from as early as 1910, and the studies covered many nutrients, including all the B vitamins; vitamins C, D, and E; calcium; chromium; iron; magnesium; zinc; selenium; and choline.
But here is the primary message that emerged from that examination of the literature: scientists were not studying nutrition in the way in which humans have evolved to require nutrients – consuming lots of them together and in balance.
This isn’t to say that the research hasn’t yielded benefits. Kaplan and her colleagues noticed that the research seemed to show that calcium, zinc, copper, and vitamin B supplementation all seemed to modestly improve mood.
What’s wrong with this single-nutrient literature? With precious few exceptions, all of it – hundreds of studies and millions of research dollars – has been wrongly based on the idea that a treatment must consist of just one nutrient at a time. . . . Yet only in the last decade or so have studies of broad spectrum or complex nutrient treatments been carried out. And compared to the single nutrient research, this literature is sparse even though it makes physiological sense for nutrients to be most effective in combination.
Broad spectrum solutions, like EMPowerplus, make sense considering that humans have consumed a broad spectrum of nutrients for millennia as part of their daily diet.