About Vitamins

The amount of information available about vitamins today is almost overwhelming. But that's actually an improvement over several decades ago when most people gave vitamins little thought. Even doctors used to say that we can get all the vitamins we need from our daily diet. They didn't used to know that smoking is linked to cancer either.

Now many doctors recommend that people take at least a daily multivitamin, and there is a growing trend in the medical professions for doctors to learn more about nutrition and vitamins and how they affect health. Even now, however, many medical schools don't offer much in their curricula in terms of nutrition, vitamin intake and their role in staying healthy.

That's partly because in the West doctors are trained to treat disease. They don't necessarily learn very much about how vitamins can keep you healthy. We've got all sorts of high tech interventions, drugs and therapies that save lives. It's almost like magic. But vitamins can play a role in helping many of us avoid the need for drugs and invasive medical procedures down the road.

Back to the idea of getting all the vitamins we need from our daily diet, that may have actually been more true 100 years ago than it is today. Now so much of our food is cut, dried, canned, pounded, extracted, packaged and repackaged, in other words highly processed that many of the vitamins that promote health are lost in the process. Having the food production and distribution system that we now have means that fewer people go hungry, but it also means that a lot of what's filling our bellies doesn't contain enough nutrients for optimal health.

That means taking vitamin supplements is a very good idea. Eating as many fresh vegetables, fresh fruits and whole grains as possible helps too. In earlier times, those were the main elements of people's day-to-day diets.

Subscribing to a newsletter, such as Andrew Weil's, Dr. Susan Lark's or Dr. David Williams' is a great way to learn more about vitamins. Each of them sell 30-day supplies of multivitamin formulas that you can order online or by phone. Some formulas are made just for women, some for athletes, some for seniors and some for certain medical conditions. Some vitamins will agree with you more than others. The thing to do is read up on them a little bit, try some and see if your overall energy and resistance to illness increases.