|
Vitamins: How To Keep Your Body Healthy By Using Vitamins Safely
By: Ian Mason
Vitamins are an important part of a health diet. Unlike carbohydrates, proteins, and fats, vitamins do not directly provide building blocks or energy for your body; vitamins function as assistants to your body in creating and breakdown down building blocks and storing and releasing energy. Vitamins come in two basic types: water-soluble and fat-soluble (see the table on the website below) Quick-Guide to Vitamins by Shoppe.MD Online Pharmacy If your diet generally follows the USDA Food Guide Pyramid, you will get the recommended daily allowances of vitamins (the amount people generally need). But there are many reasons why these guidelines might not get us the vitamins we need. * Day-to-day living: In the rush of daily life, it may be hard to eat a consistently balanced diet. Sometimes we skip meals or buy them from sources (like fast-food restaurants) where we do not have easy access to information about nutritional value. * Pregnancy: If you are pregnant (or breastfeeding), you may need to significantly change your vitamin intake. Folic acid is crucial to the brain and nervous system development of, but at the same time an excess of other vitamins (including vitamin A) can cause serious fetal injury. * Seniority: Seniors often have difficulties eating or digesting certain foods, including those that can provide vitamins * Diets: Being on low-calorie diets or diets that restrict certain types of food can significantly impact getting enough of all kinds of vitamins. So for many of us, vitamin supplements will be helpful in getting and staying healthy. But like anything else we do for our health, it’s as important to know the risks as the benefits. * The “Too Much of a Good Thing” Trap: Vitamins in the proper doses are good for you. But many vitamins are toxic in large quantities, so taking more than enough may be a bad idea. Excess vitamin A can lead to nausea, vomiting, and peeling skin, and over the long-term can lead to significant damage to bones, brain and nerves. It can also be very dangerous for a developing fetus. Vitamin E can cause a rise in LDL (“bad”) cholesterol, and like all fat-soluble vitamins, is stored in the liver, so if you take a little bit extra every day, the impact can show up over time. Even vitamin D, the bone-building vitamin, can actually encourage bone loss if taken in excess. * Vitamins are not food: Vitamins are sometimes called “micronutrients.” Small doses can keep us healthy. However, they are not a substitute for the food that your body needs to make energy and rebuild damaged tissue. Diets that severely restrict or eliminate proteins, fats, or carbohydrates can impair functioning, and vitamins cannot make up for that. * Fetuses and children are not grown-ups: Children have special vitamins for a reason - their bodies need different things than adults do. Treat children’s supplements like any other medication; they may taste like candy, but letting your child take more than the recommended dose can have significant consequences. To keep a fetus growing steadily and correctly, a vitamin discussion should be part of your regular prenatal care. Dietary Guidelines for Americans, www.health.gov/dietaryguidelines U.S.D.A. “ Food Guide Pyramid,” www.usda.gov/cnpp/pyramid2.htm “Getting enough vitamins. Do you need to supplement a healthy diet?”Mayo Clinic Womens Healthsource. Volume 3, Issue March 7, p 4-5, 2003 Kmietowicz , Z. “Food watchdog warns against high doses of vitamins and minerals,” British Medical Journal Volume 326, Issue1001, 2003 Oakley, GP and Mandel JS, “Folic acid fortification remains an urgent health priority,”British Medical Journal, Volume 329, Issue 7479, p1375-1376, 2004 Ian Mason, owner of Shoppe.MD, your source for Online Prescription Medications and health news. Ian studies health, weight loss, exercise, and several martial arts; maintaining several websites in an effort to help provide up-to-date and helpful information for other who share his interests in health of body and mind. Contact Ian Mason by e-mail at ian@shoppe.md. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/
Return to Index
email this
page
Still haven't found what you are
looking for?
Try this search:
Free Email
List Reveals health,
fitness and wellness
tips - secrets and information - delivered directly to
your inbox
How to Benefit from the Mind-Body Connection
(excerpt)
You are about to gain insight into the
mind-body connection. The number of
people who truly understand these principles on our
planet are relatively few.
There is an undeniable connection between our minds and
bodies, you can learn
to use this fact to your benefit.
Dr. Bernie Siegel, author of "Love, Medicine and
Miracles" was once a
distraught cancer surgeon until he
began to understand the greater principles
of the mind-
body connection. He felt dragged down by the artificial
barriers
that existed between patient and doctor, and the
helplessness he often felt as
a result of his inability
to effectively serve those patients. Eventually, those
barriers
were disintegrated by Dr. Siegel's recognition
and growing understanding of the
mind-body connection and
how it could serve his patients and himself.
Dr. Siegel, or Bernie as he began to have his patients
refer to him, had some
startling realizations as a cancer surgeon. He found that
there were actually
quite a few people in the world that successfully beat
the statistics on cancer
survival. He began to recognize that a patient's ability
to defeat something as
serious as cancer had to do with the patient's mind and
attitude about their
disease.
If you would like to see the rest of
this article, please go here:
http://www.tobeinformed.com/repository/mind-body.html
copyright 2004 - David Snape
|