Are Multi-Vitamins Beneficial
Are multivitamins beneficial to your health or a waste of money or even worse, harmful. I have mixed emotions on this, but I will say they provide a dangerous placebo that make people think they can eat junk food and solve any damage by popping a pill. Multivitamins are not a substitute for healthy eating. That’s one of the fallacies that too many people have. Not only does it not provide all the micro nutrients you’ll get from whole foods, if you’re eating junk food, you’re also filling your body with toxins and substances that can harm you. You can’t overdose on carotene, which turns into vitamin A, but you can get too much vitamin A. (There are cases where people got an orange tinge to their skin from eating too many carrots, but nothing more lethal.)
One long term study showed multivitamins had no effect on memory and some benefits for health.
One study followed 6,000 male doctors age 65. One group had a multi-vitamin and the other had a placebo that looked exactly like it. Of the two groups, there was no significant difference in memory loss over a 20 year period, but there was a small difference when it came cancer and cataracts. It lowered the risk of each by 8 to 9 percent. However, other studies show multi-vitamins can increase your risk for cancer.
There’s no difference for those suffering from heart disease.
A third study compiled the information from 27 other studies, which followed a total of 450,000 people. While they also found a small benefit for reducing the risk of cancer, they found there was no appreciable difference for heart disease. However, all the evidence from scientific studies show that you can reduce the risk of heart disease with a healthy diet and regular exercise. That not only saves money buying useless pills, it helps you stay fitter in other ways.
If you have a nutritional shortage, you should consider taking vitamins.
While taking a multivitamin for general health may be a great deal like taking antibiotics for general health, there are some people that need to do just that. If you have a nutritional shortage, which can occur even if you eat a healthy diet due to illness or a chronic condition, then a specific vitamin is beneficial. However, for those who simply take it to be on the safe side, it can actually increase the risk of a serious disease or shorten your lifespan. While some supplements are good for a specific condition, they may increase the risk for another. Vitamin A in its natural form is known to be helpful for COPD, but may increase the risk of lung cancer.
- If you’re going to supplement, consider seasoning your food more liberally. Herbs and spices are powerhouses of nutrients and won’t affect your body like manufactured vitamins.
- One of the best things you can do is drink the full glass of water if you’re taking a multivitamin. The water will do more good than the vitamin.
- One of my clients was a construction worker and built a building on a sewage dumping site used by the city in the past, before regulations stopped it. Not only were there hundreds of volunteer tomatoes, you could also see many almost completely undigested multivitamins on the ground. Many just pass through the body without digesting.
- One huge exception is the supplementation of folic acid for women of child-bearing age. It’s proven to help prevent birth defects in babies when taken early enough before the pregnancy.
Even in a warm area like San Antonio, you may need to winterize your workouts. While a low temperature like 40 to 41 degrees is like a warm spring day to someone in Minnesota, Wisconsin or Northern Indiana, it’s still chilly when you’re not used to the cold. For people in colder climates, adjusting your workout to the winter is of utmost importance and can be crucial to your health. If you workout outside, such as running in the morning, you have to take a few precautions to account for the cold.
Learning to tune into your body can help you become healthier and stay that way. Some people just know when they need to change their diet or need more protein or vegetables. They’ve learned to pay attention to the subtle cues that the body offers and follow through with the request to feed it right. If you’ve ever felt out of sorts only to realize later that the reason is all the junk food and lack of fruits and veggies in your diet, you have a clue how your body communicates with you.
No matter who you are and what you’re doing, when you first start out toward any goal that requires a change in your behavior, it’s not easy. You automatically revert to your previous behavior out of habit. In order to see real change, you have to set reminders out for yourself to keep telling you to make that change. It isn’t that you don’t want to change your lifestyle, it’s just too easy to go on automatic pilot and revert to old behaviors, such as unhealthy snacking or forgetting to exercise.
I’ve had people come into the gym dragging. They workout regularly and think it’s enough to keep them functioning well. Exercise is great and does boost your energy level, but if you’re not running on real food even that benefit will soon fade. Eating healthy provides the body with nutrients to build new cells and keep all parts of your body in top operating condition. Some foods actually make you feel tired, and not the sleepy, good type of tired like the tryptophan in turkey does.
There are so many stressors in our environment, from the food we eat, pollutants we breathe and the toxic stress at work or home, it’s important to revitalize your health and learn to live a healthier lifestyle. It won’t change the environment around you, but it can make you more able to live longer and with less stress. Even when the day is crazy, some of these tips can get you back to normal in no time at all.
Choosing who has to cook or being stuck with the job because you’re the only one in the house can be a tough job. If one person enjoys cooking, that’s great, life should be filled with things you enjoy. However, for everyone that hates to cook, but enjoys eating, minimalist cooking should be at the top of your list. Not only is minimalist cooking easier, it has many other benefits, which can include eating healthier than you did before you started. Minimalist cooking does NOT mean buying prepared frozen meals. Even though you’re doing less, you’re also getting less nutrients.
If you’ve spent half your life calorie counting and find it boring and frustrating, don’t change it out for counting carbs. That’s just like calorie counting but with a twist. The best way to lose weight is to eat healthy and not worry about carbs or calories. There’s no need to record every bite, as long as you know the foods that are good for you and save you calories.
Whether it’s the rush of hormones you feel after working out or that feeling of relief when you burn off stress, you’ll not only feel better, you’ll boost your mental well being. Healthy goes with happy in other ways besides just modifying the flood of hormones in your body to give that temporary feeling of a high and relief from the pressures of the day.
There’s a lot of hype about all the good a cleanse or detox can do for both weight loss and what ails you, but there’s very little evidence. One thing is certain, it does provide an opportunity to reboot your body, like you would a computer, and then start on a healthy diet adding new foods each day. It can be a way of finding food intolerance if you have problems after you eat and won’t really hurt you unless you have a medical condition.