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Multivitamin Supplements: Why They Are 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 boosts the immune system and is an antioxidant, and also helps keep skin healthy; it also helps to heal wounds and prevent scar formation.
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.
Some multivitamin supplements also contain vitamin K. Vitamin K deficiency can lead to bleeding, easy bruising, and brittle bones, or osteoporosis.
Calcium is among the mega minerals that are important to good health, and is found in many multivitamin supplements. Along with vitamin D and vitamin K, it's necessary to your diet in order to maintain adequate bone mass. You need enough calcium in your diet or through multivitamin supplements for good health, and it also reduces the risk of fracture in bones for older people.
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.
Although it's possible that your diet provides 100% of your recommended daily allowance of the necessary vitamins and minerals, it's relatively rare that any one person can do so every single day, especially with the lives most of us lead. There are lots of different multivitamin supplements available on the market, and you may need to do some research to decide which one is best for you. If you experience side effects when you begin to take a multivitamin supplement, stop taking the supplement and see if the problem subsides. If it does, ask your doctor to recommend a multivitamin supplement for you.
There are about a dozen different vitamins and minerals recognized as important for humans to consume. If you are shortchanged on any of them for a significant amount of time, you could begin to experience deficiency symptoms. And again, multivitamin supplements can prevent these types of deficiencies, but are still no substitute for a healthy diet and lifestyle, one that includes good nutritious food and exercise, too.
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