Nutrient Deficiencies Can Cause Food Cravings
We recommend certain foundational vitamins and nutritional supplements as an addition to most weight loss programs for several reasons. First, many people find that adding vitamins like the super food trio or some type of multiple vitamin and mineral help to reduce their cravings. This may be because their bodies are searching for certain missing nutrients, and this may cause you to be hungry, trying to get those nutrients for your body. This could explain some cravings for sugar for example (B vitamins and/or magnesium) or chocolate (magnesium). In addition, certain key minerals are known to help reduce sugar cravings if you correct a deficiency, such as with chromium or vanadium.
Nutrient Deficiencies Can Cause Metabolism Problems
Second, since many of us have been deficient in certain vitamins, minerals or other nutrients from years, or even decades, of eating refined foods, supplements can really help us to build back up our nutrient reserves. This will supply all sorts of nutrients that will help us to use and metabolize our food properly, such as many of the B vitamins, the C complex vitamins and minerals like chromium.
Most of Our Food Is Missing Nutrients
Third, much of our food, even when organic or whole foods are consumed, is grown in mineral-deficient soils, and transported a long distance before it gets to the store. It may have easily been picked a week before you even buy it! This means that even if you are eating a whole food, unrefined diet, your foods are in all likelihood missing minerals, and also vitamins, especially antioxidants, that are necessary to health & vitality. In addition, most of us are not eating a 100 percent whole food diet, and every time you eat some packaged foods or white flour or sugar, you are missing nutrients. When foods you consume are stripped of their vitamins and minerals, you become deficient even faster, as your body needs some of those very same nutrients to digest the food!
Chemicals in Our Environment Increase Our Body’s Demand for Nutrients
In addition, our world today is full of chemicals that create free radicals. In order for our bodies to deal with these free radicals as well as to detoxify the chemicals, we use up nutrients, especially vitamins and minerals and amino acids. So even if you eat 100 percent organic foods (and very few of us do), have a good water filter and maybe even an air filter to purify the air in your home, you will still be exposed to chemicals. Even if your house is 100 percent green and non-toxic, (and most of our homes are far from it!), most of us regularly spend time outside and/or shopping and/or at a place of employment that exposes you to chemicals. In fact, our generation is exposed to far more chemicals than ever before, and far more than are naturally found in our environment. This is why we need more antioxidants and other vitamins and nutrients to help your body dispose of these toxins so you don’t get sick.
Are Synthetic Vitamins the Answer?
If you are feeding your body all the nutrients it needs, often various food cravings will go away and then of course it will be much easier to lose weight. Many people think they can address the vitamin and mineral deficiencies with synthetic nutritional supplements. In fact, did you know that most of the vitamins sold today, even in health food stores, are synthetic? Synthetic vitamins may sometimes serve their purpose in increasing your intake of certain nutrients, however, studies have shown that the body can more easily assimilate vitamins and minerals that occur naturally in foods. Also, consuming nutrients in isolation can sometimes make you more deficient in other nutrients over the long run. This is why I only recommend whole food supplements over the long term, not synthetic vitamins and minerals. So look for whole food supplements and super foods from living sources, like coral calcium, greens and more.
Copyright 2008 Karen Pijuan. This article may be copied only in its entirety and only if all links, including those in the resource box or the about-the-author section, remain intact.
Karen Pijuan is the owner of several health-related websites and has written numerous articles about nutrition, vitamins, healthy living, whole food supplements, natural body care and cleaning products, natural weight loss and more. Find out more about what to look for in a truly healthy vitamin, as well as resources for where to find the whole food vitamins she recommends at [http://www.healthy-vitamins-rx.com]Many truly natural, healthy and organic products including excellent whole food nutritional supplements can be found online at http://www.EcoViva.com
