This is an excerpt from Getting the Most Out of Your Vitamins and Minerals by Jack Challem.

Reason#2: You can use vitamins and mineral supplements to “vaccinate” yourself against an unnatural environment.

Most of us live in an environment that is, to one degree of another, unnatural and contaminated. Our bodies must endure air and water pollution, increased ultraviolet rays from sunlight, ionizing radiation from nuclear energy sources, nonionizing radiation from radio and microwaves, pesticides and an assortment of chemicals added to foods, cigarette smoke, carbon monoxide in auto exhaust, formaldehyde released from new carpeting and building materials, and, last but not least, increasingly virulent infections.

The biochemical fulcrum for all of these assaults on our bodies is increased formation of free radicals, molecular fragments that age our cells faster and make us more susceptible to cancer, heart disease and other diseases. Although free-radical formation can be slowed with antioxidants, we face a quandary: Just when we need these antioxidants more than ever before our diets, suffer from an unprecedented decline in them. The nutritional value of our food supply has diminished from overworked farmlands, poor or improper soil fertilization, and from progressive nutrient losses during shipping, partitioning, processing, cooking and reheating. If the antioxidants in our diet have historically constituted a major defense, then this defense has been seriously weakened.

To compensate for some of these losses and to bolster our biological defenses, vitamins and mineral supplements can serve as “heroic countermeasures against an unnatural environment,” contends Emmanuel Cheraskin, M.D., D.M.D, professor emeritus of the University of Alabama.

“We are pretty much a function of nurture and nature,” he said in an interview. “What we got from our parents, we can’t do a lot about. What we get in our environment-the air we breathe, the water we drink-we can do a little but not a lot about. The food we eat is the most controllable element in our environment.”

“The question is ‘What can we do to vaccinate ourselves?’” he continued. “For every cigarette you smoke, for example, you need more vitamin C. The RDA for vitamin C is 60 mg. For smokers, it’s officially 100mg-but that’s crazy. Smokers need far more. You also need more vitamin C if you take laxatives, antibiotics, or the contraceptive pill. The answer is that you can vaccinate yourself with vitamins.”

Cheraskin added that as our environment becomes more chemically complex, we suffer from more degenerative diseases. “Vitamins and minerals are part of the answer to these problems. In a situation where we’re blasted by so much, we need electron donors like vitamin C to compensate for the tremendous amount of damage.”