Supplements: The tool your diet may be missing

Even if you live an active lifestyle and maintain a balanced diet, you may be missing key ingredients that keep your body healthy and prevent long- term illnesses.

It’s becoming easier and easier to fill those gaps with natural health food products, or supplements.

Supplements are concentrated doses of the vitamins, minerals and nutrients we need, extracted from foods and plants and formed into easy- to-consume pills or tablets.

Peter Jones, director of the University of Manitoba’s Richardson Centre for Functional Foods and Nutraceuticals, says: “We all live busy lives. And often we don’t get our three square meals a day. So even if you adopt and embrace Canada’s Food Guide, sometimes our lifestyles or environments mean that we fail to meet the requirements for a particular nutrient.”

That’s where supplements come in.

According to Jones, there are two key roles supplements can play in our lives.

First, supplements help us get the minimum levels of vitamins, minerals and amino acids we need to be healthy into our diet, from iron to Omega 3 fatty acids to plain old calcium.

Secondly, Jones’s research suggests that supplements can help our bodies even more if we exceed the minimum recommended levels of some essential nutrients.

We are moving into a “brave new world where we’re discovering that going beyond requirement can actually furnish additional health benefits.”

Take plant sterols, for example. While they are not explicitly included in Canada’s Food Guide, Health Canada and other health authorities have concluded that plant sterols ( naturally occurring compounds that exist in plants) can reduce cholesterol by 10 to 15 per cent.

We consume on average about a half gram of plant sterols every day, but our bodies are not able to absorb them, so those useful sterols are wasted. The good news is if we take pill capsules, which are easily absorbed in our digestion system, our bodies can absorb those sterols and substantially decrease the risk of high cholesterol.

When used in consultation with our doctors and other health care practitioners, supplements can help us achieve a balanced diet and, in some cases, take advantage of additional health benefits above and beyond our minimum health requirements.