The Benefits of Vitamin C, Easy to Take Advantage of & Risk Free

benefits of vitamin c post read on!
image taken from https://www.flickr.com/photos/84744710@N06/8399032152

Vitamin C is one of the oldest vitamins available in supplement form, it has been studied for so long! For me it was one of the first vitamins I supplemented it when I was young as my dad would give me some to fight off colds and other sicknesses. Over time I researched more on it to see if I should keep taking it and overall vitamin C is one of the best things to supplement since it has no “realistic” overdose chances (in fact, huge quantities injected in the blood have been shown to fight cancer!) and gives you a lot of health benefits!

 

The Most Notable Vitamin C Benefits for Your Body

Major antioxidant. It’s very useful in manufacturing Glutathione, the bodies primary antioxidant. It’s also why when I drink alcohol I take some vitamin C supplements (1-2g) before hand, usually alongside N-Acetyl Cysteine (NAC) since they both work very well together to protect me from alcohol’s toxicity and prevent almost all potential hangovers for me.

Vitamin E Benefits & The danger of Common Vitamin E supplements

benefits of vitamin E and potential risk of vitamin E supplementsTo start off with this post, I want to mention the benefits of vitamin E for your body, some good health foods to get the vitamin E you need and finally why you probably want to AVOID vitamin E supplements!

What does vitamin E do?

The primary vitamin E benefits for our body is for skin protection against environmental damage. It protects the skin against free radicals and other environmental factors such as UVB rays from the sun. It’s a very important antioxidant for the body. the antioxidant activity from vitamin E can be summarized quickly from this paragraph in this life extension article:

“Vitamin E, because it’s a lipid-soluble antioxidant, easily penetrates into the vital membranes of the skin cells and accumulates there to protect against the damaging effects of lipid peroxidation.2 Both tocotrienols and tocopherols can freely donate a hydrogen atom (a proton plus electron) from the hydroxyl group on their chromanol ring. This action completes the molecular structure of the unbalanced free radical, effectively inactivating or quenching it.”

Magnesium Deficiency Symptoms And Supplementation Advice (Half of Americans are deficient!)

Magnesium deficiency is highly probable in our modern daysMagnesium is out there with vitamin D and omega 3’s as something almost everyone needs to supplement with. Originally, humans were gaining a lot of their daily magnesium intake from water but nowadays because of industrialization and water filtering most of the magnesium is removed. Some people in rural towns might also have “hard water” problems where minerals destroy the plumbing over time so they remove naturally occurring minerals (including magnesium of course) to preserve the plumbing but harm the minerals in their drinking water! Most likely you are under the RDA for magnesium unless you eat a ridiculous amount of magnesium rich foods such as spinach (my favorite) and are drinking spring water. Even then, most soil is depleted of magnesium which makes it even harder to realistically expect you are getting as much magnesium in your food as you might think from watching a nutrition counter such as http://cronometer.com/. The USDA say that over half of the people living in the US are under the RDA for magnesium which is actually too low to start with.

How to Benefit From Omega 3 & Fish Oil Benefits

Headline image for fish oil benefits & omega 3Fish oil is, as you can guess from the name, is taken from the tissues of oily fish. It contains an essential fatty acid called omega 3 which is further divided into two important parts, eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA).

As you are probably aware by now, most people are severely deficient in omega 3 in the average North American diet. To take advantage of the fish oil benefits that will be explained below, it’s important to understand that they come from having a good omega 3 to omega 6 ratio.

The Importance of the Omega 3 to Omega 6 Ratio

As I explain in the intro in my previous post on some of the common side effects of fish oil (mainly when taken as supplements), it’s very important to have this ratio as close to 1:1 to 1:3 as possible (omega 3 to omega 6) instead of the standard of 1:15 to 1:17 that most people in North America have. The only source of omega 3 in most North American’s diet is fish since most animals are fed grain nowadays to cut cost. The problem with animals such as beef being fed grain is that while they contain the same amounts of omega 6 as if they would be fed grass, they have very little omega 3. Grass fed beef usually contains a 1:1 ratio. Originally our ancestors were eating grass fed beef (since feeding them grain is unnatural for their diet… It was only done by the agricultural industry to cut costs). Also, many of us cook with vegetable oil which increases by a lot your omega 6 and messes up your ideal ratio even more. For this reason I completely ditched vegetable oils in the past few years except Olive oil every now and then (but not for cooking, only flavor). So now that you understand the importance you’re omega 3 to omega 6 ratio, onwards to the actual fish oil benefits you gain when you control of it!

The Major Fish Oil Benefits (By Having a Healthy Omega 3:6 Ratio)

The benefits from omega 3 come from eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docasahexaenoic acid (DHA). Both of these are important and it’s often debated back and forth which one is the most important… Either way, whether you get it your omega 3’s from fish or supplements, you will usually get around an almost equal amount of both. More on the exact quantities later! For now, the health benefits of having a good omega 3 ratio as taken on lef.org, head there if you want to see the studies backing up these claims. Most of these health benefits are quite well known throughout the population so they should come at no surprise!

  • Omega-3 fatty acids have a well-established role in preventing cardiovascular disease and death.

2 Very Important Tips to Prevent Fish oil Side Effects From Supplements

Image headline for fish oil side effects postAs anyone who is reading this page probably knows by now, fish oil supplements are all the rage nowadays as the benefits of omega 3 have become more and more evident in a lot of research. 10,000 years ago most human beings probably had a 1:2 or 1:3 ratio of omega 3 to omega 6 and currently this ratio has been heavily pushed towards omega 6. In a typical North American diet on average is now 1:15 to 1:17. The reason? Omega 3 consumption has gone done and omega 6 consumption has gone up thanks to the overuse of vegetable oils. The easy way (but not necessarily the best long term solution) is to take fish oil supplements, but are there side effects to these? Here are a few things to consider in terms of fish oil side effects. None of these are deadly BUT you can easily avoid some of these if you take the necessary precautions, you don’t want to cancel out the health benefits of adding extra omega 3 to your diet right?

Vitamin B12 Injections to Cure B12 Deficiency

Vitamin b12 shots can help with deficiency symptomsA serious Vitamin B12 deficiency called Hypocobalaminemia can cause severe and irreversible damage to the brain and nervous system if not treated in a timely manner, and if serious enough and left untreated can even lead to death. Luckily the body has the ability to store sufficient amounts of Vitamin B12 for long periods of time and may be reabsorbed. However, recent studies have effectively proven that most deficiencies are as a result of poor absorption ability, not low consumption.

Many foods we buy today are fortified with vitamin b12 because it is such an important vitamin and is usually only found in meats and foods of animal origin such as milk and eggs, leaving vegans and vegetarians at risk for deficiency. But studies have also shown that a very large portion of the population, vegetarians and non-vegetarians, and more than was originally thought, are vitamin B12 deficient. This indicates that vitamin b12 is more difficult to absorb through regular ingestion than we like to think.