Working Caregiver- Caregiver & Senior Nutrition and Health
Are Vitamins Equal? On Caregiver & Senior Health & Nutrition
Are All Vitamins Created Equal?
By Nikki Jackson, CCN
We've all heard the good old phrase, "an apple a day keeps the doctor away." While its true that fresh fruits and veggies are part of a healthy lifestyle, not many people get all the needed servings with our busy days! And those of us that do, the fruits and veggies we eat today are different from those eaten by our parents and grandparents who grew them in the garden! Unless you're eating 100% organic, it’s very difficult to attain all the vitamins and minerals our bodies need for optimal health from diet alone. Taking a good multivitamin/multimineral complex can play a role to ensure you are getting needed nutrients that may be lacking from our foods.
Caregiver & Senior Health Tips for choosing a multivitamin:
- Look for products that are "GMP Certified." This stands for Good Manufacturing Practices and means the company follows careful rules and regulations set under section 520 of the Food, Drug and Cosmetic (FD&C) Act.
- Try to buy a multivitamin in capsule form. This helps to achieve better absorption. You see many of the B-vitamins are heat sensitive. In the production process, making a tablet requires heat and pressure to form a tablet. Sometimes the activity of the vitamins can be lost during this process! Just for fun, if you have a multivitamin in tablet form, drop one in a glass of water and see how long it takes to dissolve! This will give you an idea of what happens in our body. I recommend my clients choose capsule forms to ensure bioavailability of the product. For more info on GMP certifications, visit http://www.fda.gov/cdrh/devadvice/32.html.
- You get what you pay for! This phrase is especially true of the vitamin industry. I recommend clients buy from a retailer that takes time to research the companies for which they supply. It breaks my heart when I hear of someone who tried "the natural way" by using a vitamin or herb that "didn't work." Usually, its not the vitamin, it's the way it was manufactured!
- Visit www.consumerlabs.com. This is a great tool for checking the quality and control of supplement companies. You might be surprised what you find out!
If you would like more information on this topic, or recommendations for companies I use in my practice, please don’t hesitate to contact me at nikki@austinccn.com.
*These statements are opinions of the author and in no way seek to diagnose or treat any conditions. These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA.
