Why are multivitamins important for your health?

Sometimes, when your only source of news is from mainstream media, it seems as if taking nutritional supplements is worse than taking medicines. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Especially multivitamins and fish oil can be your cheapest way to top health in addition to a healthy diet. People following healthy diets, are as rare as diamonds and it most certainly doesn't mean following the latest fad diet where you must buy expensive exotic ingredients to be doing it right.

Sadly this is possible when the general public is not being educated properly. Even our national nutritional council (Voedingscentrum) still keeps spouting how you should be consuming artificial margarine instead of real butter as it 'contains extra vitamin D' while butter from grass-fed cows will contain this naturally.

However, there is one truth that is universally embraced by almost everyone: in order to become healthier one has to consumer larger amounts of vegetables and fruits and less heavily processed foods. The sad truth is how most Dutch citizens don't even ingest 200 grams of vegetables and fruit on a given day, a far cry from the recommended 500 grams never mind the optimal 750 grams that is considered to be ideal when you're striving from longevity.

How do you recognize vitamin B deficiency?

Traditional media often run stories about how supplements may cause problems. One of the problems with studies highlighting supplements is they typically use synthetic vitamins, and not whole food supplements. Your body was not made to process unnatural agents, often posing as equivalents to the real thing. The reality is they are frequently not the same and do not provide you with the same health benefits.

Vitamin deficiencies may lead to illness and disease, and contribute to chronic issues such as high blood pressure, dementia and cancer. One nutritional deficiency having the potential to wreak havoc on your health, your cognition and even your respiratory system is a deficiency in vitamin B complex. B vitamins also help your body to detoxify from chronic exposure to pollutants and chemicals.

How to reduce stress with ASMR

Our brain is programmed to stress us. It does that a lot and on just about any subject. Like a lot of behavioral reactions, stress used to be and still is a survival mechanism that our brain used in order to inject alertness when needed. It’s there so we could harness internal resources and spring into action in a matter of seconds when hunted or hunting.

Fortunately for us, we rarely need to spring into action nowadays to avoid a prowling lion. Today, stress is not helpful and is often counter-productive. When stressed, most of us lose focus and are immersed in unpleasant feelings.

In the past, we needed all that “potential energy” when we faced fight or flight situations. It probably saved our lives more than once. Today, this energy still exists in each of us in certain situations; if it is not discharged via some sort of conduit (either physical or of a more neural nature), it slows us down.
That’s why we need to get creative in the way we release stress. We don’t have time to go on a vacation every week; often we even can’t step away from the almighty computer, tablet, or cell phone.

Timing of supplements

We frequently receive the question whether it really matters when to use a particular supplement.
Most supplements come with instructions to ingest them with a meal. This is in the assumption that meal contain fat, as fat will aid with absorption through the gut wall. Whether or not this can be your first meal of the day, depends on how much fat it contains. Especially fat-soluble vitamins, such as A,D, E and K need fat for proper absorption.
A work-around is to ingest them together with a larger amount of fish or krill oil softgels if your first meal doesn't contain enough fat.
Another reason take supplements with a meal, is that taking it by itself, can cause nausea or discomfort.

How to repel mosquitoes

Rarely have people been so upset about mosquitoes as in this past week: a plague of mosquitoes seems to have arrived in the Netherlands and most surrounding countries.
The reason it is possible to have so many blood thirsty mosquitoes swarm around us, is that mosquito eggs incubate in water puddles as small as a rain gutter, cavities on flat roofs, empty plant pots or pet bowls.
In 14 days or less when it is very warm, larvae become fully grown adults, of which the females start searching for blood. The combination of a semi-monsoon in June and sudden tropical heat in July caused a mosquito 'babyboom'.