Multivitamins are necessary Nutrition in bodybuilding, Is it true?
One out of three people who are working out or into fitness takes
a multivitamin supplement. I mean, who doesn't want to be able to every day eat a
chewy gummy of your favorite cartoon character? Right, but the question is, are
they wasting their money?
Questions You Should Ask Yourself Before Consuming Multivitamins In Your Diet For Muscle Gains -
Do you really need to be taking a multivitamin every single day?
supplementing with vitamins and minerals, in general, be beneficial?
Yes, 100% there's a lot of research out thereto support that, but the question is, can you take a multivitamin that is supposedly going to cover all of your nutritional basic needs all at once and get the same benefits?
Will it be as beneficial as taking individual vitamins and minerals as needed and when you need them?
I'm going to explain
why taking a multivitamin may not be the best option for you to get your vitamin
and mineral intake, so let's go ahead and dive right into it.
The first thing is
that just because you put something in your body doesn't mean that your body
absorbs it and utilizes it.
It doesn't have to
utilize everything that you eat or you ingest. Some things just get excreted or
part of things just get excreted.
And whenever we take a multivitamin that has a lot of
vitamins and minerals that we are all taking in, once typically, they're usually in a little bit higher doses as well as an example, calcium, iron,
magnesium, and zinc all compete for absorption.
Whenever you take
these together in these larger quantities, you typically don't get as good of an
absorption rate.
These specifically
are usually done best and absorbed the best whenever they are taken away from
the other minerals.
Same thing for
vitamin K and vitamin E. also will affect each other’s absorption rates and
are typically best not taken together.
So this is one of the
ways that taking a multivitamin may not have the effect that you want because
you are less likely to actually absorb and utilize all the vitamins and minerals
that they contain because multiple of these actually compete for absorption.
Brief about Multivitamins -
Typically,
multivitamins contain lower grade forms of several of the vitamins and minerals
that they put in it. This can make things be less bioavailable, which essentially means that you are less
likely to be able to absorb and utilize it and just kind of a cheaper form.
Typically, multivitamins will also contain a cheaper and less
bioavailable form of certain vitamins and minerals. So as an example, we'll
look at magnesium. Typically, magnesium oxide is one of the more common forms of
magnesium that is put into a multivitamin.
If you look at
magnesium oxide, which is a cheaper form as compared to some other ones like a
magnesium glycinate, what we find is that the bioavailability or the amount
that's actually absorbed is a lot lower. Plus magnesium oxide also typically causes stomach distress, but these are cheaper forms, easier to use, so they're
typically more common in multivitamins. Let's also look into some of the research on multivitamins.
One of the biggest reasons that most people take a multivitamin is for longevity, the longevity of life.
So a lot of times people believe by taking a multivitamin,
it's gonna help cover all their basic nutritional needs to make sure that they
don't have any micronutrient or vitamin and mineral deficiencies.
Therefore, they should be in theory less likely to get
certain diseases because they don't have these deficiencies on the whole.
When looking at trials that are evaluating multivitamins,
they have found that they don't really increase any incidents of cancer or cardiovascular disease or really any other life-threatening disease in
general.
So based on the research, looking at multivitamins, you're
finding that it doesn't really increase the longevity of life against life-threatening diseases.
Balanced Diet Is Important with multivitamins -
Well, maybe here's potentially the biggest issue that I have found that when most people, not everyone, but when a lot of people are taking a multivitamin, they believe that they are already
covering their nutritional basic needs.
Therefore they don't
worry as much about eating a balanced diet. The balanced diet is going to be the biggest key because we have to remember that everything else that we take as a
supplement multivitamins, whether they work or not, are designed to supplement a
good quality balanced diet.
And it's not uncommon for people that are taking multivitamins to not pay as much attention to their balanced diet or whether or
not they're getting one because they believe that they're already getting their
nutritional needs covered.
And also, as I mentioned earlier, whenever you're taking a
multivitamin, because several of these compete for absorption because they typically have cheaper forms of the vitamins and minerals inside them, you're
looking at being way less likely to be able to cover all of your basic needs,
not including the fact that the majority of vitamins and minerals out there
don't have every single vitamin and mineral within them.
Track Your Calories And Your Vitamin and Minerals Content -
The best thing for you to do in my opinion is to track
your food and use the apps that will tell you your vitamin and mineral content.
We have apps out there that whenever you track what food you're eating, it will
tell you what vitamins and minerals you're getting and in total so that you can
start to see on the average what vitamin and mineral intake you're actually
getting from your food. Doing this doesn't require any more work than just tracking your food.
It's just using the
right apps that will tell you your vitamin and mineral intake that you're
getting. And then whenever you start to pay attention to this and you see over a
period of weeks or months and you start to look at averages, you'll find
specific vitamins, specific vitamins, and minerals that you're not getting enough of from your diet.
From there You can actually go in and supplement with those couple of individual vitamins and minerals that you know that you
need. Therefore you know that you're getting a better rate of absorption because
you're potentially going to get a better quality, uh, type of that vitamin.
You're not going to have it competing for absorption because
it's not fighting against all these other vitamins and minerals. You're getting
more along the lines of what you need, not including the fact that I didn't even
mention that you may be getting too much of certain vitamins and minerals
because you may be getting a lot of it from your food and then adding it from a
multivitamin.
Track Your Deficiences -
We eat a lot of the same foods over and over again, so it
makes it a lot easier when we eat a lot of the same foods to see where our deficiencies are. For me specifically based on the current diet regimen that
I have right now, I find that I usually don't get enough magnesium and there's
couple of B vitamins that I typically am lacking in at least to hit my RDAs, my
minimums.
So for me, I will
supplement with magnesium and those couple of B vitamins that I need and at the
time being without, you know, going in and getting more blood tests to verify
stuff. I don't worry about the other vitamins and minerals because I know that I
should be getting enough from my food.
Conclusion -
Wrapping up. Vitamin and mineral intake
and supplementation can definitely be beneficial, but you're going to be a lot
better off if you can verify and validate what vitamins and minerals you need
based on your current nutrition routine and then supplement with the ones that
you find that you need instead of taking a multivitamin and hoping that it's
just going to cover all of your basic needs.
If You Have Any Query Related to this Topic, Contact us Through Mail- Rohannara23@gmail.com
I'm Rohan Nara founder of Beasthacks.i'm into the fitness from past 3 years and i was 43kg before and then i transformed myself for more details check out transformation stories section.
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