Nutritional supplements enhance your regular diet to ensure a healthy supply of nutrients. They contain vitamins and minerals that help you feel better, look better, and even sleep better. Nutritional imbalances can cause symptoms you didn't even realize were because of a vitamin or mineral deficiency.
Dietary Supplement and Nutritional Facts Panels are mandatory on most food and dietary supplements.
Dietary supplements can be used to improve physical performance during exercise, build muscle, change body composition and delay fatigue. If used unwisely, however, they can affect overall health adversely. Dosage is one key concern that should be taken into account with supplement use.
Safety and quality are the most important factors to consider when shopping for vitamins and supplements. However, there are other aspects to think about as well. For example, some coatings and added ingredients in supplements may be derived from animal products
Most supplements should be taken with food to reduce the chances they'll upset your stomach and to stimulate digestion and improve absorption. For a select few, it really doesn't matter if you take them on an empty stomach
It's also important to note that while diet pills and vitamin injections can help suppress your appetite or speed up your metabolism, they won't help you lose weight unless you burn more calories than you eat. Thus, weight loss supplements only really work if you stick to a healthy diet and exercise regularly.
When you start taking vitamins, you should expect to experience the following benefits - your energy levels will increase, more food will be converted into energy, your short-term memory will improve, your immune system will become stronger, your muscles will become stronger, and your skin will look healthier.
There are three principles to supplementing wisely:
⦁ Get nutrients from food whenever possible.
⦁ Take nutrients in their naturally occurring form whenever possible.
⦁ Be selective with your supplementation.
Normally, most people should be able to get all the nutrients they need from a balanced diet. However, supplements can provide you with extra nutrients when your diet is lacking or certain health conditions (such as cancer, diabetes, or chronic diarrhea) trigger a deficiency.
Generally, dietary supplements are products intended to supplement the diet. Therefore, they are also referred to as food supplements. So, there is no significant difference between food supplement and dietary supplement. These types of supplements can be taken by mouth as a tablet, capsule, pill or a liquid.