Why Are Multivitamins Supplements Essential to Your Health?
Multivitamin supplements can be a good way to get the vitamins you need, especially if your own diet doesn’t give you all the nutrients you need. That said, of course, multivitamin supplements can’t do everything and won’t replace the benefits of a healthy diet in general; they will simply fill in gaps for those times when you just can’t quite eat right.
Multivitamin vitamin supplements include vitamins as well as minerals. The minerals included are important to everyday health, and many people can be deficient in them. They include magnesium, iron, calcium and zinc. Multivitamin supplements also contain many different vitamins, as listed below.
Vitamin A is found in most multivitamin supplements. It’s rare to be deficient in vitamin A unless you are elderly. However, vitamin A is necessary for your immune system to function at its best, and it is sometimes recommended to prevent certain types of birth defects or to prevent bone loss. However, vitamin A can be toxic in large doses, so it should never be taken to excess.
Beta carotene is an antioxidant in multivitamin supplements that helps increase white blood cell numbers and boosts the body’s disease fighting immune activities. Together, vitamin A and beta carotene keep the cells in your eyes healthy.
Folic acid is an especially important nutrient during pregnancy and is included in prenatal multivitamin supplements. If you are deficient in folic acid during pregnancy, your baby can have a low birth weight and will also be at increased risk of neural tube defects, such as spina bifida.
There are quite a few B vitamins, and most of them are found in multivitamin supplements. Folic acid is technically a B vitamin. Pyridoxine is another. Along with B12, pyridoxine is important for controlling levels of homocysteine in the blood. High levels of homocysteine can lead to heart disease, strokes, and Alzheimer’s disease. Vitamin B12 can also help fight heart disease, anemia, and memory loss. Thiamine, also called vitamin B1, is important for proper brain function. The vitamin niacin, also called B3, prevents a disease called pellagra. Pellagra is relatively rare, but it is caused by a deficiency in niacin and results in scaly sores on the skin, inflamed mucous membranes, diarrhea, and mental confusion.
Vitamin C is an antioxidant and a booster of the immune system that helps keep skin healthy and helps in healing of wounds and scars.
Adequate amounts of vitamin D are essential to making sure you absorb enough of the mineral calcium. If you don’t get enough vitamin D, you can have fractures, bone loss, and can experience a disease called rickets. This can cause severe bone pain to occur. Vitamin D can be manufactured in the body if you get enough exposure to sunlight, but it’s often necessary in multivitamin supplements because today, many people don’t get enough sunlight. In addition, the deficiency is very painful and detrimental. However, it can be toxic in large amounts, so don’t overdo.
Vitamin K, too, is another important vitamin, and its deficiency can cause osteoporosis (brittle bones), easy bruising, and bleeding.
Vitamin K, vitamin D and calcium (a mineral) are found in many multivitamin supplements; calcium is necessary to build and maintain proper bone mass. If you consume enough calcium (along with vitamin D and vitamin K), you can reduce the risk of bone fracture once you get older.
Multivitamin supplements can provide more than 100% of the recommended daily allowance of some vitamins, but in most cases, it’s not safe to consume very large amounts of any vitamin or mineral by itself. The levels included in multivitamins are usually safe, but if you take too many supplements in individual form and too much of them, extremely large doses could be unsafe.
Theoretically, your diet is supposed to be sufficient to provide 100% of your recommended daily allowance of the basic vitamins and minerals, but the person who eats a balanced diet with adequate vitamins and minerals every single day is rare in today’s fast-paced world. There are many multivitamins available, and it may take some research to decide which kind is best for you. If you start taking a multivitamin supplement and experience any side effects, it is a good idea to stop taking them and see if the problem goes away. If so, you should ask your doctor to recommend a multivitamin supplement.
There are about a dozen recognized vitamins that humans are recommended to consume in certain quantities. A long term shortage in any of them can cause symptoms of vitamin deficiency. While multivitamin supplements can do a great job of preventing vitamin deficiencies, they’re not a substitute for a healthy lifestyle, including a healthy diet and regular exercise.
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February 28th, 2010 at 1:12 am
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