If you eat all of the vitamins/mineral/amino acids supplements and drink plenty of water; is that basically the same thing as eating fruits and vegetables?
If you could eat all the nutrition in a fruit through supplements, then what’s the difference than eating the fruit itself?
No it is not the same. Nothing replaces a healthy diet.It’s different because when your nutrients are coming from foods the absorb into your body easier and better, with supplements you pee most of them out because your body is not able to fully break most of them down. You will get far better nutrition from food than supplements. Also if your supplements are cheap and aren’t high quality sourced vitamins- chances are they are doing nothing for you.
No, it is not. There is something that’s called “bioavailabity” and it envolves the Food matrix. The food matrix helps the nutrients be digest and absorved in the gastrointestinal tract. A micronutrient that is consumed in a food is better absorved for the organism than with supplements.If you only take the supplements you have a problem with the dose you take and can absorve, so you would have to supplement more to absorve the quantity you need but it would have some side effects with the dose for your intestinal cells cause some nutrients can be damaging in high doses and it would not be bioavailable at all. You could have gastrointestinal symtopms because of this and in geral, it’s not healthy.
Where would you get the calories and satiety you are taking out of your meals without fruits and vegetables ? Chances are, something worse. So even if you had perfect substitute for fruits and vegetables, you would still probably lose.
And that’s IF you manage to get everything supplemented, which is pretty unrealistic
Many of the other commenters raised good points. Something worth adding is that there’s been multiple studies that show the body only utilizes micronutrients from supplements when at a deficit of that particular nutrient, but under normal or suboptimal levels, you are just making “expensive urine” as your kidney will dump most of it out. (on mobile rn will try to link to them later today)
We are yet to fully understand how multiple micro and phytonutrients interact with all the other components that come naturally in food. You see this into play on how vitamin D, vitamin K an calcium operate - as well as vitamin C, E and iron. Also keep in mind that many micronutrients are actually produced by your gut after you feed it precursors, so the direct ingestion isn’t something normal.
All of this to say that taking one single vitamin in isolation isn’t something realistic for our body, it may be a way to solve acute deficiencies, but it doesn’t provide the body with the optimal sources it has evolved to use.