If you’ve switched to a healthy diet, get enough exercise and sleep eight hours each night, do you still need nutritional supplements? Shouldn’t you be able to get by well enough on just the healthy foods that you eat three times a day?
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In a perfect world, a good diet would be all you needed to make sure that you stayed healthy. In the real world, however, there are a number of factors that complicate the picture. In many cases, a reasonable diet alone may be unable to provide you with all the nutrients that your body needs.
There are many reasons why a good diet is often inadequate, and you need to add to your diet with dietary nutritional supplements.
Soil depletion often robs fruits and vegetables of nutritional content
Many farms are worked intensively — they are farmed with the same crops over and over again. Such farming practices result in yields of fruits and vegetables that look perfect, but that are nutritionally deficient. When your diet is made up of such produce, you don’t get all the nutrients that you need.
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The fruits and vegetables in the produce section are often hybrid varieties
Most crops raised today come from hybrid seed varieties. These ensure high yield, resistance to disease and attractive appearance. What they don’t ensure is high nutrition levels. When your diet is full of hybrid food varieties, you don’t get enough nutrition.
Your food may be short on trace elements
When intensive farming practices rob soil of its nutrients, modern agriculture uses fertilizers to replenish the soil. Unfortunately, fertilizers don’t manage to put in everything that such soil misses. Soil often requires trace elements that fertilizers don’t come with. When your food doesn’t possess these trace elements, your health suffers.
Farm soil tends to not have the microbiome that it needs
Natural soil contains microorganisms that are indispensable to crop health. One of their main functions: they help make the nutrients and minerals in soil usable to plants. Unfortunately, modern farming practices make use of many chemicals that end up destroying good, essential soil microorganisms. The result is that they aren’t able to make soil nutrients available to crops. You end up eating food that is seriously short of essential nutrients.
The transportation of food items robs it of its nutritional content
Produce harvested isn’t directly delivered to your refrigerator. It goes through a long transportation and storage process before it ever gets to a consumer. This is time that depletes produce of much of its nutrition.
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Your digestion may be compromised
Age naturally weakens the digestive system. With age, the body loses some of its ability to absorb the nutrients present in food eaten. You may supply your body with all the nutritious foods that you want — the nutrition simply isn’t efficiently taken in. You may have a weak digestive system even when you’re young. It’s important to correct for such problems.
You may live an unhealthy lifestyle
If you battle stress each day, it can cause your body to lose nutrients such as magnesium and zinc. A coffee habit can make it harder for your body to absorb the iron present in food, and smoking and alcohol can cause the body’s supplies of vitamin C to deplete. Even the use of some pharmaceutical medications can rob the body of its supplies of nutrients.
The body needs nutrients in adequate supply in order to function. If your diet is unable to supply your body with the nutrients that it needs, or if your body is unable to absorb the nutrients that it needs from your diet, nutritional supplements can be an excellent way to make up for the shortfall. Talking to your doctor about testing for deficiencies and finding out what nutritional supplements you need is an important step to take for good health.