Why Vitamins are Important
Did you know that your body requires over 90 nutrients to maintain your health, including at least 16 separate vitamins? If you don’t get the vitamins you need, your body cannot perform all of the literally millions of chemical creations that compose the functions of life. Combined with minerals, enzymes, cofactors, water, and heat (a.k.a. calories), vitamins form one of the major pillars of your body’s function.
Vitamins are used by your body not just for catalyzing chemical reactions, but also for protecting arterial health, creating firm, soft skin, supporting your immune system against the quadrillions of viruses and bacteria that even the safest of us come across every day, and maintaining the balance of hormones that keep your body at the right temperature, energy level, and emotional balance. The antioxidant vitamins — A, C, and E — protect your body from the damage effects of free radicals and AGEs (Advanced Glycation End-products), which cause wrinkles, liver spots, and other signs of aging.
To turn calories from food into energy to burn, your body uses a chemical process that absolutely requires plentiful amounts of the B-spectrum vitamins as well as vitamin C. Calcium cannot be absorbed into your bones without ample Vitamin D3, which also has a protective role in your body’s continuous fight to prevent cancer.
Vitamins come primarily from the food that we eat every day. Some foods have more vitamins, some have fewer. Generally speaking, organic foods have more and raw (yes, uncooked) foods have more. Pasteurized, irradiated, and highly processed foods have much, much less, and canned or jarred foods have almost none.
Generally, high-vitamin foods include unprocessed fruits and vegetables, unpasteurized dairy products, non-farm-raised fish, and free-range poultry and red meats. If you cannot get all of these from your local markets, it may be wise to look into supplements to recover those items your body isn’t getting from your food.
The important part is that you understand that flour and sugar actually have negative value in terms of vitamins — they are so processed that your body actually has to add vitamins to them in order to digest them. In this way, they literally leach vitamins from your body every time you eat them. Coke and similar acidic, sugar-based drinks are particularly bad in this regard. Every can of Coke you drink is like consuming the opposite of a multivitamin.
I hope you understand now just why vitamins are critical to your continued health and life, and how you can make sure you get the vitamins you need. Live a Healthy Life!
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