Life
The benefits of vitamins
Fact: Everybody knows that it’s important to get enough vitamins. Unfortunately there is no exact science of the facts about vitamins for determining just how much of any given vitamin, mineral, or essential nutrient anybody needs at any given time.
Your age, your genetics, the varying combinations of the foods you eat and the times you eat them all interact with disease conditions to determine how much of various nutrients you need. Your needs aren’t exactly the same as anybody else”s. Your needs aren’t even exactly the same each and every day. It’s one of the basic facts about vitamins that a daily multivitamin is extremely important to ensure good health.
Severe deficiencies of vitamins or minerals are relatively rare in healthy, young people. Slight deficiencies of certain ingredients, however, are fairly common. Vitamin B-12 is a common nutritional deficiency in people over 60 years of age. Calcium, chromium, folic acid, magnesium, vitamin B6, vitamin C, vitamin D, vitamin E, and zinc are frequently deficient among people of all ages.
Just a little deficiency can create big problems in your health over the long run. Insufficient intake of vitamin D and calcium raises your risk of developing osteoporosis. Not getting enough folic acid and vitamin B6 increases your risk of heart disease.
Certain illnesses put a severe strain on the body’s stores of vitamins. Antioxidant vitamins are depleted by diabetes. Ulcerative colitis, pancreatitis, and Crohn’s disease can rob the body of vitamins D, E, and K.
One of the more somber facts about vitamins is that HIV depletes virtually every vitamin and mineral, as do smoking cigarettes and drinking excessive alcohol. And just because you do not have HIV does not mean you are safe.
