Monday 12 September 2016

Health Check: can vitamins supplement a poor diet?

Vitamins and minerals are essential for keeping us in good health. While eating a varied diet should give us all the nutrients we need, recent diet and health surveys show the typical Australian diet is far from varied – or even close to what is considered a healthy diet.

To the rescue come vitamin and mineral supplements, but can they deliver on their promises and are they for everyone?

Who needs a supplement?

When writing about supplements, a glib approach is to state we can get everything we need from food, so we don’t need them. Eat your veggies. Don’t take supplements. End of story.

That isn’t the whole story, though. Already, our food supply is fortifiedwith folic acid, iodine and thiamin to prevent serious public health issues related to conditions arising from deficiencies of these nutrients in some groups of people. So the rationale of needing to supplement for best health has some validity, but is underpinned by our generally poor eating habits to begin with. For the full article click here 



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