Vitamins come in many different shapes and sizes.
If your diet is poor and consists of a lot of fast food and not many fruits and vegetables, you risk nutritional deficiencies. To make sure your body gets all the vitamins and minerals it needs to stay healthy, you can take a supplement. Nutritional supplements will help strengthen your immune system, so you get sick less often. With the many vitamin and mineral supplements available today, it is important to select the right one for you.
Instructions
1. Get in the habit of reading labels. Find out what the ingredients are in the supplements you are considering purchasing. Check what the serving size is and which nutrients one serving provides.
2. Look on the packaging for "USP," which means the supplements were tested by an independent laboratory. The laboratory verifies that the supplements meet all nutritional supplement standards set forth by the U.S. Pharmacopeia (USP) testing organization. Contact the brand's customer service if the label doesn't mention it. Choose supplements that were tested so you know they actually contain what the packaging claims they do.
3. Check the expiration date of the supplements, and make sure they are not outdated. Avoid purchasing vitamins and minerals that don't have an expiration date.
4. Decide whether you prefer supplements in liquid form, tablet form or capsule form. Keep in mind that liquid vitamins don't necessarily taste good but come in handy if you have trouble swallowing tablets. Check the size of nutritional supplement tablets to see if you will be able to swallow them. Count on taking more than one capsule if this is your choice of supplement. Unlike tablets, capsules are not compressed so you may have to take two.
5. Choose enteric-coated nutritional supplement tablets if they are available. The Nutritional Supplements Health Guide website states that these supplements are pricey but worth it because they don't dissolve until they are in the small intestine, which is where all nutrients are absorbed. They don't dissolve in your stomach like other supplements do.
6. Find the word "chelate" or "chelated" on the packaging of nutritional supplements. This means that protein was attached to the minerals before they were added to the supplement. According to the Health Guidance website, this increases the absorption of the supplement in the cells and blood stream up to 800 percent.
Tags: nutritional supplement, expiration date, make sure, nutritional supplement tablets, supplement tablets, , were tested