They are much more predictable, well understood and easier to dose than the chemical cocktail of natural compounds. Please note that I am not saying that there aren’t any useful natural medicines. I am stating that it is better to isolate the active components.
Gonna have to downvote you on this one but only technically. The problem is our limited knowledge of effects of everything in every mixture. We may know a specific molecule has X effect but are unaware of how Y help regulate it and Z boosts its effectiveness and L protects against its negative effects. For whatever reason we see natural sources as having these other factors which if we understood them better we could 100% emulate but they are complex and its hard to account for all variables. lab research depends on limiting variables as much as possible.
If you are talking about enzyme inhibition in the liver, that is just another advantage of isolated chemicals. The metabolization is far more predictable.
no im talking about our knowledge of substances tends to be very narrow and we don’t necessarily put the right combination together. A better example would be vitamin D and calcium. People are told to get vitamin D and they know they need to get calcium and they may see milk is supplemented with it. This is because we know vitamin D helps absorption of calcium which pretty much means getting it into our blood. That info was not known all at once and now we also know vitamin K is needed to get calcium into bone but we did not before 1974 and vitamin D started getting added before ww2. As far as I know we still don’t add vitamin K. If for some reason you got your vitamins from a pill like that guy who ate almost nothing it would not be as good as eating a cron diet.
This only applies to anything taken orally and absorbed by the intestine. Also this can both be positive or negative since it increases or decreases absorption of the active agent, which makes it less predictable. Most “ingredients” dont cross the blood-brain barrier.
I can’t think of a natural remedy over a synthetic/isolated that would not be oral. My point though is that I think the synthetic/isolated is superior if we actually know everything about the thing and can make that perfect concoction but most of the time we only really understand one dimension of how a natural thing works so the natural can be superior. Also though if the intervention need is high I will go for the man made thing. So prediabetic I will add barberries to my diet maybe but if I pass into diabetese I will likely take the metformin or whatever the doctor suggests.
We also don’t know how the natural remedy works. It’s dangerous to think something natural is automatically safer, nature is a bitch.
We by and large eat anything edible that is not posionous so its as safe as eating any food. granted though supplementing with it is not necessarily good if its being purified. Thats like just a half measure of purification but adding foods to the diet you otherwise don’t eat is not dangerous.
In general I agree with you, but I’m going to play the devil’s advocate. I think it’s fair to mention that not everything we eat and consider edible is not poisonous. Especially when it comes to food that contains chemicals which kill you slowly, like carcinogens. It’s beneficial to check what our food items do to us long-term, just like it is beneficial to check our medicinal remedies.
fair enough but I don’t think it invalidates the technically part of my initial response which I think is what we are talking about.