Why Are Multivitamins Supplements Essential to Your Health?

Multivitamin supplements are a convenient way to prevent vitamin deficiency when your diet does not provide adequate nutrition. While multivitamin supplements don’t mean you can eat unhealthy foods all the time and get away with it, they do provide backup nutrition when your diet falls short of optimal.

Multivitamin supplements often include minerals. Some of the minerals that people are prone to be deficient in are iron, magnesium, zinc, and calcium. Multivitamin supplements contain many different kinds of vitamins, including the ones listed here.

Vitamin A is one of the vitamins multivitamins supplements usually contain. It’s relatively rare to be deficient in vitamin A, unless you are older. You need vitamin A to have your immune system function at its best, and it’s also important to prevent certain types of birth defects and bone loss. However, it can be toxic in large doses, so avoid overuse.

Beta-carotene is another supplement found in multivitamin supplements. It functions as an antioxidant and can also increase white blood cell count; it also boosts your immunity. Beta-carotene and vitamin A also are important to eye health.

Folic acid is an especially important supplement to take during pregnancy, and is included in most prenatal multivitamin supplements. If you are deficient in folic acid while you’re pregnant, your baby could be born with low birth weight or neural tube defects such as spina bifida.

The B vitamin family has quite a few members, with most included in multivitamin supplements. Folic acid is one of these, and pyridoxine is another. Vitamin B12 and pyridoxine help control the levels of homocysteine in the blood. Homocysteine, when high, can contribute to strokes, heart disease, and Alzheimer’s disease. Vitamin B12 can help fight anemia, heart disease and memory loss. Vitamin B1, or thiamine, is important for proper brain function. Niacin, also called vitamin B3, is a preventative for a disease called pellagra. Although pellagra is relatively rare, it can occur in someone who is deficient in niacin; people suffering from pellagra have inflamed mucous membranes, mental confusion, diarrhea, and scaly sores on the skin.

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.

Vitamin D is essential to proper absorption of the mineral calcium. A deficiency of vitamin D can lead to bone loss, fractures, and a disease called rickets, which can result in severe bone pain. Though vitamin D can be manufactured by the human body from exposure to sunlight, it is included in multivitamin supplements too because the deficiency can be so painful. However, that doesn’t mean that you should take mega doses of it.

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.

While multivitamin supplements may provide more than 100% of your recommended daily allowance of some vitamins, it is not a good idea to consume enormous amounts of any vitamin or mineral. The levels in multivitamins are generally considered safe, but supplements containing individual vitamins sometimes contain doses large enough that they could be risky.

Although in theory it’s possible to get everything you need from your diet, it’s rare to get enough vitamins and minerals every day from your diet, in adequate amounts. There are lots of multivitamin supplements available, and it’s important that you do some research to determine the best one for you. Monitor yourself carefully if you do decide to start taking multivitamin supplements, since any side effects may be detrimental; stop taking them if you do experience side effects and see if the side effects go away. If you do experience side effects, ask your doctor to recommend a multivitamin supplement for you.

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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