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Vitamin Supplements

Vitamin supplements are a common sight on the shelves in the medicine section of a grocery store. Health Stores and pharmacies often have entire sections devoted to vitamins. The wonderful thing about vitamins is that they are almost never harmful, and your body does not react badly to a daily regimen of vitamins.

The first vitamins to be discovered were actually the B1 vitamin, or thiamine. It is a water soluble amino acid group that is produced exclusively in plants. All animals must get their thiamine from plants, whether indirectly or directly. Thiamine is an excellent example of why vitamin supplements are useful. If a person has a diet unusually low in fruits, vegetables, and grains they can take a vitamin B supplement to augment their intake of vitamin B to a normal level.

Vitamin supplements exist in two types, single vitamin supplements such as vitamin C or vitamin B pills; and multivitamins. The multivitamin provides the daily recommended intake of many different vitamins. It is ideal for today’s face paced, junk food eating world. Your body naturally expels vitamins in excess of what it needs to function without producing extra stress on your kidneys and liver. This means that it is safe to take a multivitamin even if you are getting the recommended daily value of certain vitamins from other sources.

Doctors will sometimes proscribe a vitamin supplement as a first prognosis for certain ailments. This dates back to the discovery of vitamin B, which was immediately linked with a thiamine deficiency disorder that was a previously incurable disease. Following that discovery, many of the diseases of the time were re-evaluated and found to be dietary deficiency disorders. Doctors now routinely check for these disorders in patients; after all who wants to pay for a costly proscription when they can take an inexpensive vitamin supplement instead?

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