Learning to Evaluate Vitamins and Supplements

The key to a long and healthy life lies in the choices we make every day. Do you eat a balanced diet? Exercise regularly? Spend sufficient time in sunlight? Are you supplying your body with the vitamins and minerals it requires to function at its best?

Current estimations by the World Health Organization state that around 2 billion people worldwide suffer from micronutrient deficiency, aka hidden hunger. That’s over 30% of the world’s population!

Iron and vitamin B12 deficiency results in anemia, iodine is crucial for cognitive development, vitamin A supports eyesight and the immune system, zinc contributes to immunity. And the list goes on. The solution is seemingly simple (or at least, so we’re made to believe): you take a magic pill once a day, and your body will suddenly get access to everything it may not be receiving from your diet.

Why we need to be careful when choosing supplements

On the whole, multivitamins and supplements are great inventions – they’re the easiest way to ensure you’re getting all the micronutrients you need, and in the right amounts. But if only things were that simple, right?

In today’s market, consumers are bombarded with supplements stating that they prevent cardiovascular disease, support bone health, improve the function of the immune system, or even prevent cancer. More often than not, these statements are untrue. Add to this the risks of shopping for supplements online, and you find yourself drowning in a sea of choices, with absolutely no idea what to do.

So to help you out, we’re going to go over some key points you need to consider when trying to find the best supplements for you.

More expensive is not always better

The simple truth about supplements is that a bottle of pills that sets you back $100 per month might be just as useless as something you’d pick up for 10% of its price. The cost of multivitamins says absolutely nothing about how effective they actually are.

Instead, when shopping for a supplement, you’ll want to focus on the label. Unfortunately, this is where the trouble starts for most people. Unless you’re a fitness and nutrition enthusiast or have extensive knowledge regarding the human body, you’ll probably have no idea where to start.

Fortunately, educating yourself on the best way to evaluate vitamins and supplements isn’t too hard. All you have to know are the key factors to look out for.

The ingredients

If you’re going to be taking a multivitamin to help your body function as efficiently as it possibly can, it’s highly recommended that you look for a compound that includes essential micronutrients. These include:

• vitamins A, C, B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, B7, B9, B12, D, E, K

• Calcium

• Chromium

• Iodine

• Magnesium

• Manganese

• Molybdenum

• Selenium

• Zinc

An important thing to remember is that the best multivitamin is going to be one that contains beneficial quantities of these micronutrients. For most, that means 100% of the recommended daily value. But, not for all.

Calcium intake, for example, is recommended at around 1000mg per day for adults, but you can only absorb half of that at a time. Additionally, you’ll want to avoid megadoses, which are sometimes 10 to 50 times more than optimal, disrupting the balance in your organism.

Another thing to keep in mind is the presence of harmful ingredients in your daily pill or capsule. These often include sugars and synthetic sweeteners, coloring agents, and fillers.

If you’re vegetarian, vegan, or even have specific dietary restrictions, you’ll also want to look out for the capsules which are often made out of bovine gelatine or can even be too slow to digest in your gastrointestinal system.

Getting the best possible formula

With all this information, it becomes obvious that supplementation is hardly something that can be solved by taking a pill in the morning and thinking that it’s magically going to make you healthy.

Giving your body what it needs is going to take research, consultations with your doctor, and in an ideal world, some testing that will determine whether you have a micronutrient deficiency. Once you have this data, you can go ahead and choose the ideal solution for you.

Nowadays, technology even allows you to make your own supplements. This gives you more control over what you feed your body. After all, supplements aren’t controlled by the FDA, which means that manufacturers can use (and market) almost anything they want.

So, when choosing your next multivitamin, you should go with something that:

• Includes sufficient quantities of essential micronutrients

• Doesn’t bombard you with megadoses

• Doesn’t include ingredients that are harmful or unsafe

• Takes into account the fact that certain nutrients compete with each other for absorption

• Gives you an AM and PM formula so you get the most out of your supplementation

Final thoughts

The thing to remember about giving your body the micro and macronutrients it needs to function properly is that a balanced, healthy diet is rarely about the cost. Making sure that you’re getting what you need doesn’t have to be expensive – but it has to be right for you. Reaching for the cheapest (or costliest) bottle of pills at the supermarket is hardly going to cut it, and it may even have a bad influence on your health.

So, the next time you’re shopping for multivitamins and supplements, make sure you’re carefully studying the label. Whether they’re actually beneficial to you is far more likely to show on there than to be reflected in the cost.