Many of my patients ask me what kind of vitamins and supplements they should take. So I would like to go over some basic information and guidelines for taking vitamins. With future newsletters, I will talk more about individual vitamin and mineral requirements, how your body uses that vitamin or mineral and what are good sources of that particular vitamin or mineral.
- You should take vitamins as supplements, not as a replacement for eating and living healthier (more veggies, less carbohydrates, and exercise).
- Vitamins in liquid form have a higher absorption rate into your body than do pill vitamins. Liquid vitamins have an absorption rate of 80 – 90% of the vitamin versus 10 – 20% in pill form.
- Vitamins and minerals from whole food sources (less processing and no synthetics) are utilized by the body much better and you will typically get more trace and micro minerals with those types of vitamins.
- When you are under stress you should make sure you take your vitamins – stress depletes your stores faster than normal.
- As we get older, vitamins and minerals are even more important to our health. There are a number of conditions (hypothyroidism and fibromyalgia are just two), which respond very positively when a person takes particular supplements.