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A healthy diet is the cornerstone of good health but when your basic day-to-day diet is not meeting the recommended daily allowance of all the essential vitamins and minerals a healthy body needs, then the time comes to use food supplements.
Food supplements are just what they sound like: supplemental items that are consumed in tandem with food items for the purpose of providing the full nutritional values that all of us need in our diets. These food supplements can come in many forms, all of them with their own features and benefits as well as varying levels of nutritional value for health and fitness. Let’s take a look at two common types of food supplements.
Daily multivitamins: There are many kinds of vitamins that will fall into this category. These commonly available types of food supplements are available in all encompassing “one a day” type vitamins for adults (such as the Centrum™ Brand “A to Zinc” vitamin), chewable kid’s multivitamins (such as the Flintstones™ brand daily multi vitamin for children) as well as more specialized food supplements like those for older individuals with additional food supplements for the elderly, who have their own set of nutritional, and therefore food supplement, needs (such as additional Calcium).
Sports Drinks: There are many food supplements that are available on the market today that are referred to as “sports drinks”. Within the “sport drink” category there are a few subdivisions as well. On one hand you have the sports “thirst quenchers”. Items like this, Gatorade™ for example, are designed to re-hydrate the body as quickly as quickly as possible (theoretically quicker than even water can, in some cases) and replace a type of nutrient referred to as electrolytes back into the body (electrolytes are lost when you sweat during exercise). It is in this capacity that sports drinks like Gatorade are also a food supplement. Another type of sports drink is the herbal blends that have a variety of medicinal an pseudo-medicinal components in them and are sometimes referred to as “energy drinks”. An example of this type of drink would be Red Bull™ (which contains Taurine, amongst other things) or the SOBE™ brand drinks that contain many different food supplements like Ginkgo Biloba, Ginseng, Bee Pollen, and others.
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