Facts About Supplements

Supplements are either medicine or natural foods which are given to individuals who are either suffering from nutritional deficiency or eat food that is low on essential nutrients. Supplements help the body gain the nutrients it needs to function normally and strengthen its immunity.

If you've done even a bit of searching around for some healthy supplements, you will defiantly vouch for the enormity of options available. There are millions of products being sold under the label of ‘food supplement', ‘diet supplement' and ‘health supplement'. The claims these products make would make you think why anyone would even bother to eat food. Just gobble down a bunch of pills and dispense with the whole practice of preparing and sitting down to eat a wholesome meal. But the fact of the matter is that it's precisely claims like these that have made supplements the shady area of health products.

Most supplements are sold in connection with weight loss. But since these are not ‘drugs', they generally fall out of the jurisdiction of drug control and monitoring authorities like the FDA. In less developed countries where institutes like the FDA are not active or operative, there's an even greater flood of all sorts of ‘supplements'.

The downturn of all this is that health conscious individuals have been divided onto roughly two parts. One thinks that all supplements are evil and the capitalist's way to make money. The other half thinks that supplements are wonder drugs or miracle workers. The facts about supplements would support neither theory;

1. Supplements are not wonder drugs: supplements are not the answer to each and every health problem. And you can't lose weight by simply packing on the supplements while still chowing down on chips and fries. Weight loss will be the result of a balanced nutritious diet paired with an exercise plan. Supplements will help to meet any nutritious deficiencies your body may face as a result of lowering calories. but beyond that they cannot exclusively cause weight loss.

2. Supplements are not useless: when they really are supplements, they aren't duds. They provide your body with the vitamins or minerals it may have missed out on. Often many complicated health problems are the result of not getting the right nutrients, and a simple fix like multivitamins or green tea may help your body better utilize the nutrients from other food as well as strengthen the immune system.

3. Both natural as well as pharmaceutical supplements are affective: although some people think that natural supplements are better than pharmaceutical ‘pills' the fact is both are equally affective. While as a purist you may prefer to have and organic supplement, it will still benefit you using the same chemicals that are present in your neighbor's supplemental pills. Also, pharmaceutical supplements are often preferred by physicians because they can control the active ingredients. For instance you may get a good amount of Vitamin C if you focus on citrus fruits, but if you have a problem of scurvy, you probably won't be able to eat a crate of oranges to get the required daily dose of itamin C. this is where the ‘pills' come in handy.

• John Palsson
• 11/12/2008, 12:59 AM
• 0 Comments