What vitamins to take to improve my health?
Before you add anything to your health routine you should take a hard look at what things can be taken away. 1. Do you smoke? If yes, then nothing is more important than stopping...
Category: Vitamins
The Minerals You Need
You hear a lot about vitamins but not so much about minerals. Problem is, even if you try to eat well, you might be coming up short on essential ones like calcium, iron, magnesium,...
Do You Know What Vitamins to Pick?
Are you overwhelmed by all the supplement options out there? Walk into any retail store and all you see are rows and rows of vitamins, supplements, weight-loss shakes, and magic weight-loss pills. So how...
What Is Inflammation
What is “inflammation” and why is everyone so concerned about it? There are two kinds of inflammation: the kind that hurts and the kind that kills. Most of us are very familiar with the...
Micronutrients
Micronutrients include vitamins and minerals. Minerals and vitamins, although part of energy-yielding reactions in your body, cannot provide energy directly. Many have antioxidant, or cell-protecting, functions (e.g., vitamins A, C, and E; copper; iron;...
Clinical trials
Much of the information we have about the effects of vitamins comes from clinical trials. A clinical trial is an experiment conducted with patients as subjects. The strongest experimental design is the randomized design...
Supplements are no substitute for a balanced diet
The most important thing to remember is that supplements are no substitute for a balanced diet. Even the best vitamin studies only show a partial reduction in the risk of disease. No supplement allows...
General guidelines for buying and taking supplements
A well-balanced multivitamin supplement is usually better than several single supplements. Such supplements contain approximately 100 per cent to 300 per cent of the RDA for those vitamins and minerals which may have protective...
Where do the vitamins in supplements come from?
Most vitamins are extracted from the food sources in which they naturally occur. For example, vitamin A is often extracted from fish liver oil. Vitamin B comes from yeast or liver, vitamin C from...
Can cravings be a sign of vitamin or mineral deficiencies?
It is possible that nutrient deficiencies may result in cravings for certain foods; for example, potassium deficiency might result in a craving for bananas or potatoes; calcium deficiency might result in a craving for...
How common are nutrient deficiencies?
It is often difficult to link one vitamin with a particular disease except in severe cases where a deficiency results in well-documented physical symptoms. For example, bleeding gums are a sign of scurvy which...
How does food preparation affect vitamins and minerals?
The way food is prepared also affects its nutritional value. For example, fried chicken contains twice the calories of grilled chicken but the same amount of protein, vitamins and minerals. The way food is...
What about Recommended Dietary Allowances?
In an effort to answer the question of how much people should aim to eat of the major nutrients, recommended dietary allowances (RDAs) were established by the Food and Nutrition Board of the US...
How much of each vitamin and mineral do we need?
For every person who asks this question, the answer will be slightly different. Each one of us has different needs and different ways of meeting those needs – a unique combination of stress and...
What are the functions of macronutrients?
Macronutrients provide energy and help maintain and repair the body. Oxygen Cells burn fuel for energy by combining it with oxygen. Water Your cells and organs depend on the involvement of water in all...
What are vitamins?
Vitamins are substances which, in small amounts, are necessary to sustain life. They must be obtained from food as they are either not made in the body at all, or are not made in...
What is Vitamin B17?
Vitamin B17 was the name given to the purified form of Amygdalin by a biochemist named Ernst T Krebs in 1952. It is a non-toxic natural product found in over 1,000 foods. Today Amygdalin...
Long-term Medial Benefits of Vitamin D
Vitamin D plays a huge role in your health. The most important area in the past has been bone health in children and adults, but many researchers think that vitamin D’s other functions may...
New Vitamin D Advice
After vitamin D became hot a few years ago, people started popping supplements. The vitamin made headlines because of research that suggested it protects against some major, heavy-hitting health problems, such as heart disease...
Checking Out Where Vitamin D Comes From
Outside the body, vitamin D comes from three major sources: • The Sun • Food • Supplements Sun The sun has provided vitamin D for thousands of years. However, the sun is also known...
Seeing How Vitamin D Affects Your Health
The medical community has known of the benefits of vitamin D on bone health for decades. In more recent years, scientists have discovered that vitamin D may play a role in many other aspects...
Moving vitamin D around the body
Vitamin D, 25(OH)D3, and calcitriol are carried in the blood by a vitamin D-binding protein. This protein is necessary because these substances aren’t water soluble and can’t dissolve in blood. (Vitamin D dissolves in...
Regulating the production of vitamin D
Several factors strictly control the amount of active vitamin D produced in the kidneys and in other tissues. The biggest factor is the result of self-regulation. As the amount of calcitriol increases, it blocks...
Get to Know the Vitamin D
You think you have enough vitamin D in your body? You’re in for a surprise. You think you know what vitamin D does for you? You’re in for a shock. Many people don’t have...
Magnesium: Nature’s Great Relaxer and Bone’s Best Friend
It might be hard to believe, but a substance that could help prevent America’s number one killer, heart disease, is right on the shelf of your local health food store. This natural mineral is...
Qualifying supplements
DID YOU REALIZE that the vitamins and other dietary supplements you use are not regulated the same way that prescriptions drugs are by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)? Luckily, an independent certification program,...
Get Your Calcium Q&A
How does a woman know whether she is getting enough calcium? Dr. Chihal: I like to tell patients that the average American diet has about 350 milligrams of calcium in it. That’s what most...
Vitamins in Your Fifties
Your fifties are most likely the decade of the menopause. And, rather like childbirth, it’s impossible to say how each woman’s experience will be. However, even if it goes enviably smoothly, there are inevitable...
Vitamins in Your Thirties and Forties
In Your Thirties … What’s going on This is the decade when a lot of us are thinking about fertility: getting pregnant, trying to get pregnant, or worrying that you’ll never have the opportunity...
How to make your vitamins work for YOU
The vitamin shelf at any health shop can be mind-bogging. What’s more, the supplements you need for optimum health vary according to your age. There’s no substitute for a good diet. That’s the first...