Important! Supplement Daily…

Why Eating Healthy Is Good But Not Optimal

One essential element of being healthy is having a good diet. You’ve probably heard that a well-balanced diet consisting of carbohydrates, proteins, and fats (macronutrients) promotes good health. But alongside these macronutrients that give us energy and enable us to build and repair our muscles, we also need micronutrients.

Micronutrients are the vitamins and minerals without which we can’t build, repair, and protect our bodies on a cellular level.

The human body is amazing. In a healthy diet virtually everything that’s eaten is put to good use.

Eating healthy food:

• Fuels physical movement and thinking
• Builds bigger muscles, stronger bones, and new neural pathways
• Repairs what was broken or stressed
• Defends the body from invaders like disease and pollution
• Replenishes what was used up after fueling, building, repairing, and defending

Whatever isn’t used daily by your body is then excreted or stored for future use.

While many of us start out with an amazing and healthy body, it’s important to feed your body what it needs to stay healthy.

That’s why a good healthy balanced diet is so important. Eating the right balance of proteins, carbohydrates (simple and complex), and fats to fuel your body and maintain a healthy weight is unique to each individual. Balancing these macronutrients can depend on a variety of factors like whether you’re male or female, how old you are, how active you are, what your current state of health is, etc.

However, figuring out the right balance of foods for your body is only one part of a healthy diet equation; ensuring that you get the proper amount of micronutrients is the other part of the equation.

Eating a variety of healthy foods is your body’s preferred choice for getting the nutrients it needs. This doesn’t mean eating a chicken breast with broccoli and potatoes every day for lunch will give you everything you need. Nor will eating a slice of toast and half a grapefruit be enough for breakfast from the age of 4 through 84.

Those foods may be good and keep you at a healthy weight, but being healthy is not as simple as just maintaining a healthy weight.

Variety in every category of macronutrients is needed in order to obtain adequate levels of micronutrients for your body to stay healthy throughout your lifetime. But with our modern diet, it’s often difficult to ensure you’re getting enough of the wide range of micronutrients your body needs.

Small amounts of vitamins and minerals are used every day to create, protect, and repair all the different cells in your body.

If the different systems in your body don’t receive adequate amounts of micronutrients, systems will degrade at an accelerated rate which can cause pain and/or failure. The pain and/or failure of one system always has a ripple effect in the body which negatively affects the other systems, leading to chronic disease or even death.

Just like with macronutrients, the amounts of micronutrients that you absorb are also somewhat individual.

Factors that can impact the amount of micronutrients you absorb include:

• Environmental pollution
• What foods are available to you
• How depleted the soil is (that the fruits and veggies you bought are grown in)
• The quality of your drinking water
• Whether you have food allergies

Some of these factors you can control, some you can’t.

Thankfully, we have supplements.

Supplementing daily with a multivitamin that includes minerals in addition to taking 1500mg of fish oil is a great way to ensure a baseline of micronutrients.

The RDA (recommended daily allowance) is an average of the minimum amounts of nutrients needed to prevent chronic deficiency diseases.

In addition to eating a variety of healthy foods, choosing a multivitamin that includes as many of the RDA’s requirements for vitamins and minerals and supplementing with 1500mg fish oil is a good way to ensure your body is getting all the essential micronutrients it needs.

People go through various stages in life and those stages often mean making changes in your diet. Similarly, there are many multi-vitamins on the market and you should choose one based on your sex, age, and any special needs (pregnancy, low iron, mood, etc.)

Here’s a list of the RDA’s minimum requirements of vitamins and minerals for adults:

Omega-3 fatty acids aren’t on the RDA’s list but they are an essential nutrient.

Essential nutrients are nutrients that your body cannot create (or create enough of) on its own. This means it’s essential to get these nutrients from your diet in order to prevent disease, grow, and be healthy.

Omega-3s are crucial for the healthy function of the brain, heart, and metabolism in addition to many other functions.

There are a few different types of omegas, but the 3 main types that we know are needed for good health are omegas 3, 6, and 9. A balance between all of them is important to our body, but omega-3s specifically should be supplemented.

In addition to getting omega-9 in your diet (avocados, walnuts, olive oil, etc.), your body also makes its own omega-9 so it’s a non-essential nutrient. Like omega-3s, omega-6s are an essential nutrient, but unlike omega-3s, most western diets are overloaded with omega-6s (corn and soybean products, vegetable oil, meats, etc.) which lead to a critical imbalance that’s unhealthy for the body. That’s why

it’s important to supplement with omega-3s specifically.

When shopping for supplements you’ll likely see three main types of omega-3s: DHA (Docosahexaenoic acid), EPA (Eicosapentaenoic acid), and ALA (Alpha-linolenic acid). These fats have been proven to aid heart health, mental health, and reduction of inflammation.

Since ALA is inefficiently converted by the body into DHA and EPA, purchasing supplements that are already in the form of DHA and EPA are a better option.

Once you are old enough to eat solid food, quantities of omega-3 exceeding 3000mg per day are perfectly safe. However, there are some people who can’t benefit from fish oil supplements. If you’re allergic to fish or have a medical condition that prompted your doctor to advise against taking fish oil supplements, ask your doctor if an algae supplement could be a good substitute.

If you’re vegan and considering an algae supplement, try to find a supplement that discloses which type of algae is used, as there are only a few species that are known to produce DHA and EPA. These algae are Chaetoceros brevis, Emiliania huxleyi, and T.weissflogii.

Also, try to find a supplement that extracts the DHA and EPA from the algae and provides 1500mg quantities as many algae supplements are sold as algae oil and include a whole host of various substances (that may or may not be beneficial) but very little DHA and EPA.

Remember, for optimal health your diet must include the balance of proteins, fats, and carbohydrates (simple and complex) that’s right for you.

• Eat a variety of healthy whole foods from each of these categories.
• Supplement with a quality multivitamin that gets as close to the RDA guidelines for your age and sex.
• Make sure to add a quality 1500mg fish oil supplement to the mix.

This is your diet for a long and healthy life.

© Cherie Fournier 2021