The best sources of vitamins are foods. However, there are reasons to use vitamin supplements because we may not be able to get all the vitamins and minerals necessary to ensure our good health from our diet.

There are many reasons for this deficiency that include the following:

• Busy lifestyles often mean missing out on healthful meals and snacks. Instead, less-than-wholesome foods are consumed while on the go, foods including sugar-laden, starch-rich and salt-infused doughnuts and sweet pastries, coffee and soda, chips and other junk foods.

• Methods used in food production are not conducive to the retention of nutrients in fruits and vegetables. For example, washing and freezing the foods while being processed makes these foods lose their nutrients so that by the time they get to the table, more than half may have been lost.

• Techniques for cooking the foods also make them lose their nutrients. Although there are foods that increase their nutritional value when cooked, most foods which are more nutritious when eaten raw are, nonetheless, cooked. In part, this may be attributed to the use of commercial pesticides and fertilizers that may only be removed from food through cooking.

Whatever the reason for diet deficiencies, you cannot hide from the fact that you are definitely losing out on significant quantities and qualities of nutrients. And eventually your body will pay the price of that deficiency.

Reasons for Supplements Consumption

The overriding reason for needing vitamin supplements rests in deficiencies of our diets. You will be able to secure all the necessary nutrients lacking in your diet through the right vitamin supplements, which means that you can be healthier, too. After all, vitamin supplements are exactly that - supplements to your diet!

Yet another benefit of vitamin supplements is that these materials target certain nutritional demands that your body has at different stages of your life. For example, as a child, you were in need of growth-enhancing vitamins that you may not have been able to secure from your diet. Thus, your parents may have provided a vitamin supplement containing all the nutrients your growing body needed.

Or during the time when you were pregnant, your doctor might have prescribed folic acid and iron supplements as well as other multivitamin supplements to answer the increased demands for these nutrients.

You might also need vitamin supplements to help you recover faster from illness, trauma or surgery. For example, people with tuberculosis are prescribed B vitamins to strengthen their immune systems as well as their lungs. Or people recovering from surgery are advised to take vitamin C and zinc for faster healing of wounds.

There are many benefits to taking vitamin supplements to bridge the gap between what the body needs and what it gets from food sources.