Are Vitamin Supplements really Necessary?Are vitamin supplements really necessary? The short answer is--it depends. If you're able to get all the nutrients that your cells need to stay healthy and free from toxins through a sensible diet that contains a lot of real food, exercise sufficiently, and rest well, then you might not need any help."Great!" You're probably thinking that you're eating right and you're involved in physical fitness so you don't need to read any more of this article but hold on a second partner--it's a little more complicated than that. Just Eating Right Isn`t EnoughA study in 2001 in the Nutrtion Practioner took a look at calcium levels in food from 1940 to 1991 and found that in a span of 50 years nutritional content--namely calcium in this case--fell by almost 50%, and it's even worse today. Just to give you an example of what that means, we have to eat twice as many vegetables today to get the same amount of nutritional content as in the 1940's. Hope you like carrots because you'll have to eat four carrots today to equal one carrot--in terms of magnesium content--from the 40's.
What's the reason for the lack of nutrients in our food? Well, there's the lack of nutrients in the soil that our food grows in from over-farming, the use artificial fertilizers, insufficient crop rotation, early harvesting, long travel times from harvest to market--and don't even get me started on genetically modified foods. The average person has no idea how much our food is lacking the crucial nutrients that our cells need to be healthy and in turn to keep us healthy. Your Cells Need HelpAre vitamin supplements really necessary? Put it this way: in our body over 100 000 chemical reactions take place in each cell every second and we have trillions of cells in our body--you do the math. Each cell requires the proper raw materials (nutrients) to perform their job, whether it be fighting infection--which by the way your body does daily--or reproducing more healthy cells, the quality and the availability of nutrients plays a huge part in our overall health. Are vitamin supplements really necessary? The more complicated answer is yes. Since many of our foods--even the good foods--are missing nutrients so will our cells, and if your cells are consistently lacking in even one nutrient this can cause cellular malfunction and disease.
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