Are you missing essential vitamins?

Vitamins, either water-soluble or fat-soluble, are essential micro-nutritional elements that help us be healthy and perform at an optimum level. How important are vitamins?

Consider for example, three common diseases that affected a great many people in the past. Mental Floss mentions these very serious diseases of the past:

• Scurvy
  
  A serious disease that causes weakening of the gums, joint pain, and so weakens the individual as they can’t work or even eat, this disease was pretty much unknown until the 1500’s when sailors, unable to eat regular and varied diets, succumbed to the unknown effects of extreme lack of Vitamin C. Until the 1800s, up to 90 percent of sailors fell sick and diet of the disease until a British Naval physician proved that supplementing sailor’s diets with limes and citrus fruits could avoid the disease.
  
  Today, scurvy is almost unheard of, world-wide. 
• Rickets
  
  Rickets is developed in both adults and children. The inability to get enough vitamin
  D, primarily through both the nutrition and through chemical reactions within the body brought on through sunlight causes a weakening or insufficient development in the bones.
  
  Unlike a disease such as scurvy, which is practically unheard of in modern times, rickets is still alive, and in fact, is on the rise as more and more children, in particular, spend the vast majority of their time indoors. 
• Beri Beri
  
  Beri Beri is a disease of debilitating neurons in the body caused by lack of vitamin B1, also known as Thiamine. It was seen primarily in South East Asia, particularly in the 1860s and beyond when ordinary brown rice was unknowingly stripped from brown rice, and people began eating white rice, which apparently had a superior taste.
  
  Today, Beri Berry is rarely seen except in cases of extreme alcoholism, in which vitamin B1 is inhibited by the alcohol from absorbing in the body.

Are we at risk today of a vitamin deficiency?

According to John Hopkins University a study of all the available evidence suggests that the $12 billion dollars Americans spend on vitamins each year, is mostly a total waste of money, with the exception of

folic acid, which does tend to reduce problems with unborn children of women who are of child-bearing age.

John Hopkins concluded:

• Vitamins do not reduce cancer or the risk of heart disease 
• Vitamins do not reduce the effect of mental decline in the elderly 
• Vitamins will not help you live longer

Despite these and numerous other medical pronouncements that you can get pretty much everything you need from a well-balanced diet, The Healthy reports that many doctors ignore their own sage advice and add supplements such as:

• Vitamin D
• Zinc
• Vitamin C
• Boswellia serrata
• Multivitamins with folic acid
• Chromium
• Lutean
• zeaxanthin
• B vitamins
• Probiotics
• Magnesium
• Omega-3
• L-theanine
• Calcium
• UC-II collagen/cartilage

The Healthy.com lists various doctors and researchers who take such vitamins, and the plain fact is, that for every doctor that speaks out about it, there are probably 20 or more who quietly supplement their own diet on the down-low.

The plain fact is that as long as you do your research and separate fact from fiction, there are probably many supplements that do at least a modicum of good.

Besides nutritional supplements, there are various over-the-counter supplements that people take to enhance their lives to relieve the symptoms of joint discomfort in their body.

Will you supplement your diet?

There is solid evidence that if you do eat a healthy diet, you can get everything you need. But will you really eat all the vegetables you should? If many doctors are quietly supplemented, should you follow suit? Only you can decide.