You realize that your diet is less than perfect, so you begin taking a good quality multi-vitamin/mineral supplement every day. You’re safe now, right? Wrong. I have yet to see any one pill contain all of the essential vitamins and minerals in their optimum amounts. Taking several pills throughout the day is currently the only feasible solution to this problem. Those extra tablets do four things:
- They supply missing nutrients.
- They minimize the chance of nutrient interactions by enabling you to take supplements at different times.
- They permit you to take supplements at the optimal time of day. Some, like lecithin or choline, are best consumed with breakfast, while others are best taken at bedtime.
- They allow you to individualize the dose to suit your needs. For example, taking extra lecithin or choline before an exam is usually advantageous, but taking them before attending a funeral is highly inadvisable.
Even the multivitamin/mineral supplements that seem to contain everything under the sun usually supply inadequate amounts of several nutrients, such as biotin, magnesium, calcium, choline, vitamin C, vitamin E, boron, and chromium.