Multivitamins Do a Body Good!
Happy Sunday all! Well I am sitting in the airport on my way to Omaha, NE for a work trip and my flight is delayed. So what better time than now to update my blog and crank out a new post. As I sit here, I started thinking how I have been sick with a not-so-nice summer cold and congestion for the last week and how the re-processed air on the plane is not going to help. Which is why I took “Airborne” about 30 minutes ago. You all know I am a tad bit of a germ-a-phobe and last thing I want is to get sick AGAIN from someone’s nasty germs floating around on the plane.
Oh I digress. I really started thinking about my immune system and what I have not been doing over the last month to keep it strong. I got food poisoning one week, then the next week I got the cold. What luck, right? I didn’t understand it because I eat healthy, drink 10-12 glasses of water a day and I work out 6 days a week. I thought I was doing everything to keep myself healthy. Then I realized, I haven’t taken a multivitamin since April. Not good. Especially not good since I have cut out a lot of carbs over the last 4 months, including some whole grains which provide us with iron and magnesium. I didn’t think about it until it was too late and I found myself standing in the middle of my kitchen popping Golden Seal Echinacea two at a time, Vitamin E, C AND my multivitamin. A sad attempt to give my immune system a majorly overdue boost!
Here is a major tip: when you are making some heavy changes in your diet, even if it is for the good, supplement your eating habits with a multivitamin as well. So often we may be eating extremely healthy and still don’t get all of the necessary nutrients needed on a daily basis. For example, when you remove carbohydrates from your diet, this often means wheat bread, brown rice, pita bread, crackers and other grains which are critical to the adult diet. Sure we want to be cautious about overindulging in these foods, but we have to remember that they provide us with iron, magnesium, and folate. For women, each of these is extremely important to our diet. Folate (folic acid) prevents neural tube defects in the fetus during pregnancy and iron is used to carry oxygen in the blood (many women in their childbearing years have iron-deficiency anemia). That is why at the very least taking a multivitamin, which has folic acid, B vitamins and many others vitamins, will supplement those foods we may have decided to give up and the nutrients we may not be getting enough of.
You may be asking yourself, how do I know which multivitamin is right for me? As you search for the multivitamin that works for your body, find one that is:
A great place to start is GNC, they have a new multi-pack for various types of women — menopausal women, active women, etc. . . Good luck in your search!
