Your Nutritional and Vitamin Supplement Information Resource

Minerals are inorganic substances found in many of the foods we eat. Minerals are just as vital to good health as vitamins and protein. They are typically trace elements that are found in the soil where much of our produce grows. Minerals play an important part in many of our bodily functions, including growth, repair, and immunity. Minerals are elements like magnesium, phosphate, iron, and calcium that your body needs to perform many life sustaining functions.

Vitamin A is an essential human nutrient. Essential means your body does not produce it, so you must obtain Vitamin A from your diet. Vitamin A and carotenoids are often cited as members of a family of antioxidant vitamins that can protect or reduce your risk to chronic disease.

Aloe has a long history as a remedy for many different ailments. Commonly known as Aloe Vera, the plant can be separated into two basic products: gel and latex. Aloe Vera gel is the leaf pulp or juice, a thin clear jelly-like substance obtained from the leaf that makes up the inner portion of the leaves.

An amino acid is a compound that your body uses to make proteins. Every part of your body, from your brain cells to your hair, from your teeth and nails to your muscles are made up of proteins. Your body can synthesize many of the amino acids it needs to make proteins on its own, but there are some that your body cannot synthesize and must acquire from the food you eat. These are known as essential amino acids.

A fitness instructor or a coach is someone that enjoys helping people improve their health and fitness by leading and organizing groups and individual exercise programs. He or she either instructs a range of activities or specializes in a particular area such as keep fit, weight training or yoga. He or she may also give advice on healthy eating and lifestyle diets. A high quality instructor will ask about your current level of fitness, your medical conditions, and any previous injuries you may have suffered so that they can provide not only an effective but also a safe fitness program tailored to your individual needs.

Our bodies are composed of ninety percent water. To keep our skin, hair, and nails healthy, we need to drink water everyday. The origin of the recommendation to drink eight glasses of water per day is not clear. Eight glasses a day is a common mantra of health gurus, personal trainers and those promoting weight loss diets. It’s a common sight: people carrying water bottles at the mall, around the office, wherever they go. It’s enough to make you wonder whether dehydration is a major public health menace. Drink water, you are told even if you are not thirsty to improve your health, your ability to exercise, and to avoid the dire consequences of dehydration. But what exactly is dehydration, and is all that water really necessary?

Exercise is something that you have to make the time for, and for most of us, exercise just isn’t that much fun. Did you know that walking is just about the best exercise of all for the average person? Believe it or not, it is even better than jogging! There’s some evidence that supports walking for a certain period of time is a better way to lose weight than jogging. The reason is you burn more fat than carbohydrates with a less strenuous exercise. Just walking at a brisk but comfortable pace for 20 to 30 minutes, three times a week, can have significant and cumulative benefit to your cardiovascular system.

Here are some ideas to get you walking:

One of the main topics of discussion these days are about which foods contain the largest amount of antioxidants. Antioxidants are disease fighting compounds that help repair and/or prevent the stress of oxidation (caused by something called a free-radical), a process that occurs naturally during normal cell functions in our body. In a major study about the amount of antioxidants in fruits and vegetables, it was found that fruit berries contain the highest amount of antioxidants. Among those that ranked high are blueberries, blackberries, and cranberries. Among the vegetable rankings, artichokes and beans ranked the highest. Peaches, mangoes, and melons, scored lower than berries but still contain plenty of antioxidants as well as other nutrients. Cinnamon, russet potatoes, and pecans are all excellent, although lesser-known sources of antioxidants. . All of these are among a growing variety of foods found to contain surprisingly high levels of the disease-fighting compounds called antioxidants. A growing number of medical professionals believe antioxidants are key to preventing cancer, heart disease and Alzheimer’s.

I received a number of questions recently on antioxidants, free-radicals, and the effects of both on our body.  I’m generating an article on the subject but wanted to get some basic information out beforehand.  Here are some of the key points:

1. When our bodies use oxygen, the cells produce free radicals that cause damage to the body’s cellular make-up.
2. Antioxidants are attracted to free radicals and basically will neutralize them.
3. Many of today’s health problems such as cancer, heart disease, diabetes, macular degeneration and others, can be directly attributed to oxidative damage caused by free radicals ravaging the body. This is not only a theory, the role the antioxidants plays in neutralizing free radicals is well documented in medical journals as far back as the 1950s.

The benefits of taking nutritional supplements are endless no matter if you have a chronic illness or feel that you are perfectly healthy. In today’s world of instant gratification, high-paced lifestyles with fast food and on-the-go meals, it is no wonder that our society’s personal health is degenerating at an alarming rate. Although we do have more medical resources in order to diagnose and treat illnesses quicker and easier, wouldn’t it be more feasible to prevent an illness before it even starts, or at best minimize the results of having a chronic illness.