Are Vitamin and Mineral Supplements Essential for Your Best Health?

How many times a week do you settle for fast food or choose prepared foods for a quick, easy meal? Relying on nutritionally compromised foods for even some of our meals works against us. Not only can “empty calories” promote weight gain, they rob us of the opportunity to provide our bodies with the vitamins and minerals we require. Whether you’re committed to improving your diet or simply want to help your body handle occasional or habitual poor eating, it pays to be wise about vitamin and mineral intake.

What are Vitamins and Minerals?

Vitamins and minerals are micronutrients your body needs. They promote health by ensuring the body functions metabolically. They are essential for tissue growth and repair and the conversion of food into energy. They help the body fight infections and disease and support many essential life processes. Our bodies cannot produce the majority of the vitamins and minerals we need, and an unbalanced, nutritionally compromised diet is unlikely to supply adequate amounts of them.

How Much is Enough?

It is not always easy to determine whether or not we are taking in enough or too much of a particular vitamin or mineral. Although recommended daily allowances provide some helpful guidelines, it is important to remember that nutritional needs vary.

Health status: In times of stress or sickness, individuals may require more than the recommended daily allowance of certain vitamins and minerals.
Pregnancy: Pregnant women or women who are nursing have specific nutritional needs that vary from any other time in their lives.
Diet: Dieting or eliminating certain food groups can dramatically affect vitamin and mineral intake and requirements.
Age: Men and women require varying amounts of vitamins and minerals at different times in their lives.

A Practical Approach

To determine your vitamins and mineral intake, start by assessing your diet. How bad is it really? How good is it? Spend some time researching the nutritional value of the foods you eat on a regular basis. If the task seems overwhelming, seek help from your doctor or a nutritionist. Determine how much or how little of all the essential vitamins and minerals you are actually taking in.

Next, determine the nutritional requirements for someone your age of similar health status. How does your diet measure up? Again, a professional can help you with the analysis, but the nutritional value of many foods is available on labels for prepared foods and via books and internet resources for whole foods.

If your diet is fairly nutritionally sound, you may find that you are getting most of the RDA of many vitamins and minerals. If it is unbalanced or poor, gaps between what you are consuming and what you need will be more substantial.

Make Adjustments as Needed

Unless your doctor recommends consuming large concentrations of specific vitamins or minerals due to a medical condition, a multi-vitamin is probably all you require. Ingesting 400 times the RDA of any vitamin or mineral is wasteful and in some cases, unhealthy. Look for multivitamins that provide nearly all of the recommended RDA for most vitamins and minerals rather than mega doses of one or two. The more balanced vitamin and mineral supplements often provide the most benefit.

Dietary changes can usually correct the imbalance between what your body needs and what it is receiving in terms of vitamins and minerals. However, being honest about what changes you are willing and able to make is crucial for success. If you are unwilling or unable to alter your diet, consider vitamin and mineral supplements the next best choice for optimum health.