Healthy Living
 

 

Choosing Vitamins

  • Choose natural versions, rather than chemically synthesized versions, when buying fat-soluble vitamins like A, D, E, and beta-carotene

  • Avoid additives like coal tars, artificial coloring, preservatives, sugars, starch, and other ingredients that you simply don't need with your vitamin

  • Don't worry about chelated minerals. Chelation means the minerals have an added protein to enhance absorption. But they're often more expensive, and the studies on whether they really are absorbed faster than nonchelated minerals are sparse

  • Don't worry about time-release formulations. These supplements may actually take longer to be absorbed and provide you with lower blood levels of the vitamin or mineral.

Minerals

Dietary Mineral are the chemical elements required by living organisms, other than the four elements Carbon, Hydrogen, Nitrogen, and Oxygen which are ubiquitous in organic molecules. They can be either bulk minerals (required in relatively large amounts) or trace minerals (required only in very small amounts).

These can be naturally occurring in food or added in elemental or mineral form, such as calcium carbonate or sodium chloride. Some of these additives come from natural sources such as ground oyster shells. Sometimes minerals are added to the diet separately from food, as vitamin and mineral supplements and in dirt eating, called pica or geophagy.

Appropriate intake levels of each dietary mineral must be sustained to maintain physical health. Excessive intake of a dietary mineral may either lead to illness directly or indirectly because of the competitive nature between mineral levels in the body. For example, large doses of zinc are not really harmful unto themselves, but will lead to a harmful copper deficiency (unless compensated for, as in the Age-Related Eye Disease Study).

  • Dairy products and green leafy vegetables for calcium

  • Nuts, soy beans, and cocoa for magnesium

  • Table salt (sodium chloride, the main source), milk and spinach for sodium

  • Legumes, whole grains, and bananas for potassium

  • Table salt is its main dietary source for chlorine

  • Meat, eggs, and legumes for sulfur

  • Red meat, leafy vegetables for iron

A large body of research suggests that humans often can benefit from mineral supplementation. Vitamins and minerals are interdependent, requiring the presence of one another for full benefit; taking a multivitamin without minerals is not nearly as effective as taking one with minerals. Extensive university research also demonstrates that the most bioavailable form of supplemental mineral is the chelated mineral (one that is bonded to a specific-size amino acid).

Źródło: www.rd.com, www.wikipedia.org