Staying healthy is of the utmost importance while in school, and this goes for both physical and mental health. As students, this is one time when it’s okay to be selfish, our health should be our number one priority. Beside working out and eating right to maintain physical health while studying to maintain and expand our minds, we can take vitamins to help both.
Now some may say that vitamins are simply placebos and they have no real effect on the body, but I beg to differ. I discovered the benefits of daily multi-vitamins first hand.
After living on campus for only one month, I had already made two trips to the infirmary and few times when I wasn’t miserably sick I wasn’t feeling good. My mother urged me to start taking a multi-vitamin with lots of vitamin C. I decided to give it a shot, after all I had nothing to lose, but like a good journalist I did a bit of research before purchasing anything. Here are the do’s and don’ts according to what I found:
- Do: Gender-specific multi-vitamins. Women specific multivitamins are not necessarily better, they contain most of the same vitamins as general supplements, but they also contain a few extra ingredients that can help support gender specific health concerts such as breast health and iron deficiency.
- Don’t: load up with horse pills. Your daily vitamin shouldn’t contain too much of anything. That’s why it is a multivitamin; it should give you just enough. Look at the drug facts, it should contain around the same amount of everything. Too much of one specific vitamin could overload your body in which case you wouldn’t be able to digest and absorb the nutrients, defeating the purpose.
When it came time to make my decision I was lured by the many tasty looking gummy bear vitamins but in the end I decided to keep it simple and I bought Women’s One A Day.
For two weeks now I have been taking one this supplement and I am happy to report that I have seen an improvement. Thanks to the 60 mg of vitamin C, I have not gotten sick since starting the pills. Also I find myself having more energy. Overall, I feel good.
Vitamins are also said to help lower stress levels, not that I have experienced that effect yet but with my busy schedule, I am not expecting my stress level to lower anytime soon anyways. Mental clarity is also said to improve while taking a daily multivitaim, but the jury is still out on this one.
Though I am only 18 years old, I am OK with taking a pill a day, especially if it keeps the doctor away!