Health Supplements
First Steps in Choosing Health Supplements
When choosing nutritional supplementation, the first step is to figure out what your purpose for doing so is. Maybe you just want to ensure that you get the recommended daily allowances for the standard vitamins and minerals. Or perhaps you know your diet is lacking in some nutrient (like calcium) that you want to replace. Some people take health supplements with the goal of slowing down the aging process. Or perhaps they want to make sure their brain has all the nutrients it needs to function optimally.
What do you Hope to Accomplish?
Learning why you want to take health supplements can help you narrow down the choices. Today there are many very high quality multi-vitamins that are well-formulated and are an easy way to make sure that you meet your recommended daily requirements for a broad range of nutrients. You can also purchase individual supplements, for the purpose of making up for the lack of a particular nutrient in your diet.
Do the Research
Research is the next step if you want to take natural health supplements for a specific purpose, such as slowing the aging process or boosting brain health. Don’t limit yourself to one source of information. There are plenty of supplement retailers who will make exaggerated claims in order to win your business. It’s best if you research several sources and come to conclusions about supplements that are corroborated by multiple experts.
Go Shopping for Health Supplements
Why Take Health Supplements?
A person may think, “Why should I take health supplements? I eat OK, and I’m not sick.” While theoretically we can all get the nutrition we need by eating the right foods, prepared properly, and in the right combinations, this is an unrealistic goal for millions of people. People today have to work long hours to make ends meet, and finding fresh, in-season foods and preparing them properly can be too costly and time-consuming. While everyone should attempt to have a diet high in whole grains, vegetables, fruits, lean proteins, and fish, it’s not something that most of us can do 365 days a year.
Prevalence of Mild Nutritional Deficiencies
Serious nutrient deficiency-based diseases like scurvy, beriberi, and rickets are fortunately rare in Western society. But nutrient deficiencies that aren’t bad enough to produce these dreaded diseases are extremely common. Nutritional supplementation vitamins, provides a simple way to alleviate these deficiencies so that bodies can operate to their full potential. There are even cases where health supplements may be preferable to foods. For example, someone who doesn’t get enough calcium may benefit more from taking a calcium supplement than from consuming all the calories that would be necessary to get the calcium from foods and milk.
Deficiency Based Diseases
Knowledge of the importance of health supplements is a relatively recent phenomenon. It wasn’t until the 1930s that scurvy was definitively linked to a vitamin C deficiency, though the connection had been proposed as far back as the 1700s. Once that connection was known, this deadly disease became simple to prevent. Numerous foods consumed in the United States are supplemented with vitamins and minerals that are commonly lacking. And although taking a daily multi-vitamin and mineral supplement is common practice today, it is a relatively recent phenomenon.
Making Up for Poor Eating Habits
Although most Westerners have access to nutritional food, vegetables in season (and out of season), and are knowledgeable about the basics of nutrition, taking supplements is a way that many of us make up for shortfalls in our daily habits. Even people who make a genuine attempt to eat a healthy diet will often take vitamins as a backstop measure to make up for any potential deficiencies. Most parents do try to ensure that their children eat healthy foods most of the time, but they can be stymied if one of their children turns out to be a picky eater. Vitamins formulated for children can give parents peace of mind that even their picky eater is getting the nutrition he or she needs. Health supplements today are rarely needed in the West to prevent major nutritional deficiency diseases, but their benefits to otherwise healthy people are too obvious to ignore.
Advantages of Taking Health Supplements
People tend to base their health on how they feel. This is what has led to many health problems in the world today since unless the problems present themselves, people take no action. The deficiency in nutrients is inevitable. People have to do whatever it takes to supplement the missing nutrients. This is where the health supplements come in. These supplements are basically nutritional products which are designed to provide the missing components in a diet thereby improving the health of the user. There are a number of advantages that one gets from the use nutritional supplements.
Better Health
The main advantage that one gets is improved health. The major reason why people end up with health problems is because of the lack of certain vital nutrients in the body. Getting sufficient vitamins and minerals in a diet is not easy. This is what calls for the need to get an external source to supplement for the missing components. Using health supplements, people are able to get all the desired components that promote better health. Supplements contain a high concentration of all the nutrients and thereby promote better health. The presence of vitamins and minerals help in the improvement of both the immune system and the nervous system.
Improved Healing Process With Health Supplements
Another great benefit that one reaps from health supplements is improved healing process. Most people today think that the healing of a wound is determined by one’s body. The healing process is determined by how well nourished the body is. When one has a poor nutrition, chances are that the healing process will be unreliable. The use of nutritional health supplements helps in resolving this problem. When we take food supplements, we get more vitamins and minerals that are responsible with the healing process. People therefore get better faster when using nutritional health products.
More Body Energy
Lastly, health supplements help in energy provision. The vitamins contained in them play a huge role one of which is in the energy provision. This eliminates the problem of being weak. People are therefore able to work for longer hours without any problem. Additionally, supplements have also been known to aid in weight loss.