By Teck Cheong Yeap


Vitamins are essential in healthy living. A well-balanced and well-rounded diet is important in providing your body with all of the vitamins and minerals that it needs to perform its various functions. There are also several different types of vitamins that we need to ensure that the various parts and functions of the body work properly. The majority of these different vitamins are available in our diets, but depending on how you eat and how well balanced your diet is, it is not uncommon to find that a person is suffering from various vitamin deficiencies.

However, it is nearly impossible for people to receive all of the necessary vitamins and minerals through their diet alone. Many people will supplement themselves with a daily multivitamin supplement, but depending on your lifestyle and diet, you may still need additional assistance in meeting your vitamin and mineral requirements.

Each vitamin has associated deficiencies and symptoms associated with those deficiencies. To assist people in ensuring that they get as many vitamins and minerals out of their diet as much as possible, the government has several different types of foods fortified with additional vitamins and minerals. For instance, to ensure that women of childbearing age receive as much folic acid as they can, the FDA requires that manufacturers fortify all flour-based foods such as breads and bagels. Milk has been fortified with vitamin D since the 1930s. This was started to help people avoid rickets in children, which is a disease caused by vitamin D deficiency.

There is a wide variety of fortified foods available as well. For instance, you're in the grocery store and you find orange juice that is fortified with calcium. These types of foods promise people that they are receiving the necessary vitamins and minerals that they need, but how much do they really help us?

When shopping for fortified foods it is important to realize that if you are already meeting your daily-recommended intake of vitamins and minerals, additional vitamins in your food is not necessarily going to assist you. In fact, it can even work against you. When you exceed your tolerable intake of certain vitamins, you can begin to have side effects. More than 2,000 milligrams of Vitamin C can give you diarrhea and upset stomach. Another example is that you can take plant sterols to lower cholesterol, but you only need two grams of this substance a day for this effect. One thing that people need to realize is that just because you can take in more, it isn't necessarily better. At the same time, the heat generated from the processing of fortified foods actually destroys many of these vitamins' components so you may not be receiving the many benefits that you think you are derived from these fortified foods, as many of the active components are destroyed in processing and cooking.