How to Choose the Right Supplements for You

Unfortunately, many people do not eat healthy diets, nor do they take supplements, and the lack of both of these in people's lives is a direct cause of early death. A healthy diet alone is enough to somewhat sustain you into old age, but supplements taken in combination with the aforesaid can bridge the gap into exceeding your predicted lifespan by many years.

Supplemental medication at one time was considered pseudoscience, but recent studies have shown them to have a direct impact on our health in a positive way and have shown very few disadvantages, and those disadvantages that do exist are more related to allergies than the vitamins and minerals themselves. Many have asked, “How did humans survive before supplements?” Well, truthfully, they didn't. Here's how to choose the right supplements for you, so you can increase both the longevity and the quality of your life.

Determine Your Nutritional Deficiencies

When you are trying to determine what supplements would be an appropriate and beneficial addition to your diet, you must first establish what it is you are lacking. The number of people predicted, in the United States alone, to be suffering from some manner of mineral or vitamin deficiency is astronomically high. Our diets alone do not sustain us and provide us the number of minerals and vitamins our bodies truly need, and although you would think they should, they simply do not. When considering these vitamins and supplements, your best point of call would be a nutritionist.

A nutritionist should be able to properly advise you and give you an idea of what exactly you should take. They will be able to give you a blood test which will discern what you are lacking, and as a result, advise you toward a correct path of treatment.

Assess Your Diet

As was mentioned in the last paragraph, your diet alone simply will not cut it. If you do not have the money to spend on a nutritionist then in accordance with the US Food and Drug Administration Recommended Daily Intake (RDI) establish which nutrients you need to help toward a healthier diet. By using the RDI you will be able to see how much of a particular nutrient you are lacking and what the recommended intake of that nutrient is.

To establish how much of a particular nutrient, vitamin or mineral, is in your food, then carefully read what the nutritional value is on the packaging of the food, or add them all up together and see how close you can get yourself to the RDI's limit. If your diet is high in some, and low in the other, then you can derive great benefit from making use of supplements. You will be able to bring your nutrient intake up, so it is a reasonable level for all of your necessary nutrients.

Do Not Exceed the Daily Limit

Adding supplemental nutrients to your diet is a fantastic way to make yourself healthier and improve your quality of life, in moderation. When you abuse vitamin and mineral supplements or just are too careless in dosing, you can cause yourself an abundance of problems that can very seriously affect your quality of life, and in some cases, make you very unwell. You should make sure you adhere strictly to the manufacturer's recommended intake to avoid overdosing on supplements; and, while you are unlikely to kill yourself, you can give yourself some nasty side-effects, such as a headache, nausea, chronic fatigue, among others.

Carefully measure and plan out your dosages so you are fully in control and not unaware of what you are taking. If you are taking powdered supplements, make sure you measure them evenly and properly, so you do not accidentally overdose.

Consult a Doctor

Although nutritionists can be very expensive privately, you should be able to consult your doctor and ask their opinion; they may be able to run tests on you, but not as extensively as an independent nutritionist would. Still, notwithstanding, before you consider taking supplements you should ask your doctor and make sure you are aware of your allergies, as many times in supplements you can find chemicals you didn't know were in there and preservatives, and if you are allergic to any of these you can risk having a very serious reaction, known as anaphylaxis, which is characterized by a swelling of the throat and inability to breathe.

Consult a doctor and make sure it is safe for you to take supplements, otherwise, you risk some potentially nasty side-effects.

Always buy your supplements from registered and approved distributors and vendors. Never buy pills from untrustworthy and unscrupulous websites, as you can never be certain what exactly they contain, and you risk making yourself very, very unwell.