Vitamin Supplements

A trip to the local health shop will show that we have only scratched the surface of the options open to us for self-medication. There are a great variety of products on the shelves which bear little or no relationship to vitamins, but they sell well and people take them, so what do they do and are we missing out on something?

This area in the health business has taken over from the tonic makers of the last hundred years or so. Until the 1930s we relied on tonic wines, cough syrups, liver pills and many more to relieve our ailments. Many of these preparations had their origins in herbal medicine, a form of treatment which reached its peak in the seventeenth century under the guidance of Nicholas Culpepper. The advance of medicine and the tightening of the laws on advertising has taken some of these products out of the chemists and into the health shops. Read the rest of this entry »

The well-planned vegetarian diet provides a perfect example of how to get all the vitamins you need without really trying. All the fruit and vegetables supply vitamin C, and the and pulses (beans and lentils), together with the whole grains and cereals, make up most of the B complex vitamins. Many vegetarians are health orientated and keen on sport and outdoor exercise. This ensures they will get all the vitamin D they need from the sunshine.

The only deficiency which might occur concerns B12 and this possibility is usually confined to vegetarians who do not eat dairy produce. Read the rest of this entry »

This is always a good subject for debate and the constant question about sex and vitamins is ‘do they help, do we need them and which are the real sex vitamins?’ The answers are never very clear, but hope springs eternal in all of us and we continue to search for the elixir of life. The claims or, more correctly, the clever copywriting on certain products in the health stores suggest that the answer has been found and lies in the formula for a mixture of vitamins, minerals and herbs. There have been no trials to prove its efficacy. In fairness it must be said that the subject does not lend itself to large scale clinical trials and statistics, but there is very little to suggest, scientifically speaking, that such a mixture would improve our sex lives. Read the rest of this entry »