What are the Multivitamin Benefits and Risks

What is a Multivitamin

The main purpose of a multivitamin is to fill in the gaps that your normal diet may miss when it comes to micronutrients like vitamins and minerals. There are certain vitamins and minerals that can be missing in most people’s diets, especially if you’re not paying close attention to what you eat.

Different Types

There are many different types of multivitamins including different ways to take them. There are multivitamins for energy, fatigue, pregnancy, men, women, chewables, tablets, powders, liquids, capsules, and more.

With all these options it’s hard to choose which one is right for you and which one will just be a waste because you already get it through your diet. For instance if you eat lots of fish then you don’t need an omega 3 supplement because you already get that naturally.

Choosing the Right One

First thing is to take a serious look at your diet and try to figure out where you might need some help picking up the slack. There are a few major micronutrients that you should look at when trying to make an evaluation.

Firstly, minerals cannot be created within the body so they need to be in the diet or in a supplement. Some major ones include magnesium, calcium, zinc, sodium, selenium, and iron. While sodium is a major mineral, there is sodium in everything we eat today in some staggering numbers so you’re probably getting too much sodium.

As far as vitamins go, the major ones are your vitamin B’s, C, E, K, A, and D. These are very important for a lot of reasons and are responsible for tons of bodily functions.

You should look for those vitamins and minerals when evaluating your diet and deciding which multivitamin has what you’re not getting enough of in your diet. However there is no substitute for hard work, exercise, and eating healthy and there is no multivitamin that can make up for eating fast food or other egregiously unhealthy foods.

Multivitamins for Energy

There are multivitamins that are specially formulated to help with energy, or at least they say they do. Here are some vitamins and minerals that any energy boosting multivitamin should have so you can make sure you’re getting what you paid for.

The minerals magnesium and zinc control well over 300 bodily functions throughout your body, and a few of them have to do with energy. Magnesium for example controls the process of releasing ATP (basically gas for you muscles), having a magnesium deficiency (like 70% of Americans) would result in tense, inefficient muscles. Zinc also helps with this because zinc is required to produce ATP, so together they are perfect for increasing energy.

Despite having ATP locked down, it’s still gotta come from somewhere, and that would be where all things start, the digestive tract. When you’re not digesting food properly it can spell trouble for your entire body. It’s basically wasting money if you don’t absorb everything you can from your food, nutrients down the drain.

The Vitamin B Complex helps to absorb nutrients in the digestive process increasing metabolism. By taking in more energy with vitamin B, and being able to release more of that energy with zinc and magnesium, energy levels should skyrocket.

What Multivitamin Should A Man Over 50 Take

As you age there are certain things that you might need that previously hadn’t even crossed your mind. One of those things could be calcium.

Calcium is extremely important as we age because it has such an influence on our bones health. Due to decay and other factors calcium becomes depleted in our bones causing then to be more brittle and break easier or cause osteoarthritis in your joints.

Everyone hears about calcium as kids making your bones stronger, and they weren’t lying. However what you may not have thought about is needing it just as much in old age as in youth.

Vitamin D is another vitamin that people don’t get enough of in this day and age, mostly because it’s produced primarily with direct sunlight hitting out skin and rarely found in food. With everyone working in the office and rarely going outside and even if you do you immediately get in the car where the sun can’t hit you or your just wearing long sleeve shirt and pants cause it’s cold outside, or wearing sunscreen can also block the sun’s rays. All of these are ways that people might not be getting enough sunlight, and thus not enough vitamin D, and on top of this, ageing makes it even harder due to a loss of efficiency when you are in direct sunlight.

In addition to this another vitamin is B12, as it provides the ability to absorb essential nutrients and allows for certain vital functions having to do with blood, nerve, and overall health. It’s estimated that 43% of adults are deficient in this vitamin.

Prenatal Multivitamin with Folic Acid

While folic acid is not required for most people it can be very beneficial for women before they become pregnant and during early pregnancy. This is because the folic acid is essential for the creation of DNA in the fetus during early stages of pregnancy.

It’s been shown that a Folic acid deficiency can lead to a high chance of birth defects due to the body not having enough to make DNA.

You should know that foliate is water-soluble, meaning that it’s easily absorbed by the body and the body can easily get rid of any excess so it’s safe to take in larger quantities for a short time. However this also means that it’s very easily destroyed by the cooking process. So put an emphasis on eating foods like leafy greens, citrus fruits, legumes, and nuts uncooked to preserve their folic acid.