We all have some sort of vitamin deficiency in our lives. A few may be obvious, but many aren’t, and we need to work on uncovering them.
Well, for one thing, we need to stop calling them “vitamins.” They are actually just “vitamins” in another sense. They are the nutrients that can help with the body’s ability to stay healthy. The primary vitamins that our bodies need are: Vitamin B, Vitamin C, Vitamin E, Vitamin D, and the trace minerals magnesium, copper, chromium, and zinc. Vitamins make up about 95% of our total food intake.
Well, good news. There is a reason that we have vitamins in our bodies, and it doesn’t have anything to do with how many we take in. We don’t need to take in lots of vitamins, we need to make sure that we are getting enough of them. In fact, there are many reasons why we need our vitamins. Not just because we are weak and in need of extra vitamins, but because we are weak and our bodies are weak.
As you may know, the main reason we need our vitamins is that we can use them to boost our levels of certain hormones, or to make certain cells have better uptake of certain nutrients. For instance, if your levels of Vitamin C are low, you may be deficient in Vitamin C, so you may require additional Vitamin C to get the Vitamin C you need. It is extremely important to make sure that you are getting your vitamin levels up.
For a long time, prenatal vitamins have been suggested to be toxic, especially as they could alter the structure of your liver. It’s true that prenatal vitamins can cause liver problems, but they are necessary to make your body strong enough to help you get through the day, and that is their purpose.
This may sound odd, but it’s true. Vitamin C can also be toxic at very high doses, which can lead to a condition called scurvy. If a person takes too much Vitamin C, their body gets rid of the protein that carries the vitamin C. If the body doesn’t get rid of the protein, it starts to break down the Vitamin C into free radicals. This is a great problem because free radicals are known to kill cells.
The good news is that there are ways to cure scurvy. For instance, you can increase your body’s Vitamin C levels by taking a regular multivitamin. You can also take it with some other vitamins (one study found that taking a Vitamin C capsule with Vitamin E and Vitamin D can help prevent scurvy, but it took four weeks for this to work) or eat more Vitamin C-rich foods like broccoli.
Vitamin C is actually not that effective against scurvy. If someone takes the full dosage there are side effects, even though scurvy is the most common cause of death among people aged 80 and older. It also tends to cause gastrointestinal issues and a rash.
Vitamin C is also not a particularly good thing to take during pregnancy. Research has shown that women who take a high dose of vitamin C during pregnancy have more complications and deaths from preeclampsia.
So what vitamin C do you take? Well, you can try drinking a glass of milk if you need a boost. There are some women who do get pregnant and then find out they’re going to give birth. A couple women I know experienced this with their first pregnancies, and one of them ended up giving birth with twins. For the rest of us, vitamin C tablets are better, but they don’t work if you have problems with constipation or kidney stones.