Given our hectic lives and busy schedules, it can be a difficult thing to consume the necessarily recommended intake of all the dietary supplements required for the proper functioning of the body. While it is recommended that you get your daily nutrition from natural whole sources such as fruits and vegetables, it can be difficult to keep an accurate track of their quantity.
This is why a lot of medical health practitioners recommend the consumption of vitamin supplements such as multivitamins or single vitamins to avoid falling deficient in any of the required food groups.
Our body requires essential nutrients such as Vitamin K, Vitamin C, Vitamin B, Omega 3 supplements etc to promote basic bodily functions and ensure proper working of the metabolism. They help in converting stored units of fat into different forms of energy and prevent the development of chronic illnesses as well.
Apart from that, dietary supplements such as beta carotene, vitamin C, and vitamin E are rich sources of antioxidants, which are useful for reducing the risk of oxidative stress by eliminating the presence of free radicals in our bodies. Taking the importance of these nutrients into consideration, it is very easy for us to experience serious health complications when we fall short of them.
A good way to combat this would seem to be taking multivitamins for health, those that combine all the essential vitamins and minerals that your body would need. However, it also raises the question – how effective are these vitamin supplements? Will they be enough to meet the specific vitamin deficiencies an individual may be experiencing?
Let us understand more about the subtleties of vitamins for health and multivitamin supplements to understand which one is more beneficial for our body.
Potential Nutritional Imbalance Due To Single Vitamin
The nutrition that we consume has a huge impact on how the reserves of existing nutrients affect our bodies. Consuming too much of one nutrient can cause serious depletion of the other. Not consuming the nutrient at all can bring down your overall health by several notches. The whole point of this is to find a balance between the number of nutrients that you consume on a daily basis. When you take multivitamin supplements, all the work that you need is already done for you. You get a balanced intake of all the nutrients that you require for the day. There is no space for error and there’s far less risk of you experiencing health complications.
Economy Of Multivitamin Supplements Over Single Vitamins
The human body requires a minimum of 10 essential nutrients a day in order to function properly. Purchasing single vitamin pill bottles for each of these nutrients can fall quite heavy on the pocket, not to mention that it would be incredibly inconvenient to time their consumption throughout the day. This can potentially take an hour of your day.
For every tablet that you take, you would also need to consume some amount of water. Once you hit the maximum water intake due to this, you can potentially experience symptoms like bloating, loss of energy, and complete depletion of electrolytes. Multivitamin supplements are far less expensive and help meet the recommended daily allowance of all these essential nutrients within a single go, which saves both your time and your money.
Possible Overdose Of Single Vitamins
When you consume single vitamin supplements such as Vitamin D supplements instead of multivitamins for health, you are at a greater risk of experiencing an overdose. Most of these vitamin supplements are highly saturated and contain more than the maximum recommended amount of vitamins that you should be consuming throughout the day.
While water-soluble vitamins for health such as Vitamin C and B complex can be excreted through your body when they get absorbed in excess, you may not be as lucky with the fat-soluble ones.
Fat-soluble vitamins such as Vitamin A, Vitamin D, and Vitamin K are absorbed by essential organs and can take up space in your body for periods as long as 6 months before they can be eliminated from the body.
This puts your body at severe risk of experiencing an overdose, causing you to suffer from symptoms such as loss of muscle coordination, drowsiness, nausea, and lack of proper cognitive functioning. When it comes to the consumption of multivitamins for health, maintaining your intake is the key component to not falling sick.
Protection Offered By Multivitamin Supplements
When you purchase multivitamin supplements, you are getting every single nutrient that you could possibly think of needing. This gives you an added edge over several health complications and greatly reduces the risk of developing a deficiency. In case you decide to take single vitamins, there is bound to be at least one nutrient that you miss out on, one nutrient that you may end up consuming too much of. This is why it is recommended that you do the smart thing here and invest in a high-quality multivitamin source that you can include in your daily nutritional intake.
Unnecessary Consumption
Unless you are suffering from a disease that requires you to consume a very specific type of vitamins for health, it does not really make sense for you to invest in a single vitamin supplement. Conditions like anaemia require you to consume about 100 mg of iron a day despite consuming a multivitamin.
While circumstances like these definitely warrant the use of a single vitamin, using them without any prevalent health condition can be dangerous for your body, causing you to develop conditions such as hemochromatosis – a condition that causes the malfunction of important organs such as the kidney and the liver.
Precautions
Always make sure to consult with a doctor before supplementing your diet regardless of whether you are using a single vitamin or a multivitamin. This helps you understand your body’s needs and estimate the pattern of nutritional intake that you should be following. When you finally do purchase a vitamin supplement, here are a few things that you should keep in mind:
- Make sure to check the back of your vitamin supplement and verify that the individual components of the supplement do not exceed the recommended daily allowance.
- Make sure that these dietary supplements are using the most bioavailable form of nutrients possible.
Always use dietary supplements that have been verified by trustable organisations such as the FDA to avoid unwanted complications.
