Sun and Supplements: Good Nutrition for Busy Brits

If you’re anything like the average Brit, you want to maintain a regular health and wellness regimen, but your busy schedule and last minute commitments can sometimes send you off track. You know that you need to maintain a balanced diet to look after your wellbeing, but still continue to fall short on valuable and vital nutrients. Therefore, registered dietician and best-selling author, Dave Grotto is here with a few simple and effective tips that can help you to maintain proper nutrition even when time is tight.

Firstly, make sure your meals are filled with nutrients. Set aside five minutes in your morning schedule for packing a healthy lunch. Grotto says, ‘It’s vital that we find ways to get the nutrients our bodies need and eating well-balanced meals can do just that.’ Make sure your lunch box is packed with protein and fibre to give you sustained energy throughout the day. Try preparing a salad with grilled chicken or a turkey sandwich on whole wheat bread.

On top of making the right food choices, you can fill the gaps in your nutrients by taking quality dietary supplements. As Grotto recommends, ‘Nature Made VitaMelts come in great flavours like juicy orange and melt smoothly in your mouth without water which provides an enjoyable vitamin experience. Plus they come in a handy, portable flip-top pack which can fit perfectly in your gym bag, or work bag, an added convenience factor on days you may not be eating as properly as you should.’

Once you’ve got your diet and supplement regime in place, get out in the sunshine and get some exercise. Even minimal activity, such as taking the stairs at work or going for a ten minute walk around the block on your lunch break, can be beneficial to your wellness. As an added bonus, being outdoors exposes your skin to the sun, which helps your body to produce vitamin D. This vitamin is important for bone strength, but vitamin D is scarce in many foods so sunshine is very important.

Finally, remember that it’s important to have a little “me time”. Overall health and wellbeing depends on getting enough rest and relaxation. Grotto recommends that you get seven to nine hours sleep a night, and that, when possible, you go to bed at the same time each night. This helps your body to know when it’s time to be tired, and when it isn’t, and can do your health a world of good.

Sun and Supplements: Good Nutrition for Busy Brits

Categories: exercise, grotto, grotto recommends, lunch, nutrients, sunshine, Supplements, time, vitamin

How Vitamin D Deficiency Affects Children’s Health

Vitamin D is the ‘sunshine vitamin’. It’s known by this nickname because we can get all of our vitamin D needs from exposure to the sun. While this is fine in hot countries, it’s not so great in perpetually drizzling places like the UK. It’s thought that in the winter time, a majority of people in the UK will have a mild vitamin D deficiency. According to new research, this is something that we need to worry about, and this is especially true for children.

 

A new study, released by the Nationwide Children’s Hospital, has shed light on the impact of vitamin D insufficiency in paediatric patients who have low bone density. Vitamin D deficiency is emerging as a serious problem in the world of paediatrics. A mild degree of vitamin D deficiency, which is known as vitamin D insufficiency, can cause rickets in children. The good news is that it can be treated with increased amount of nutritional vitamin D intake as well as increased exposure to the sun.

 

The study looked at 85 patients, and found that a worrying 80 percent showed vitamin D insufficiency. It was also true that all of them had a history of bone fragility or underlying chronic medical conditions that put them at a risk of osteoporosis. Osteoporosis has been thought of as just an adult disease, but is now increasingly seen in children and can often originate during childhood.

 

Vitamin D insufficiency may contribute to low bone mass and it can even make the underlying metabolic bone disease worse if it is not treated. Vitamin D is absolutely essential to the good health of your bones.

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How Vitamin D Deficiency Affects Children’s Health

Categories: osteoporosis, sunshine, Vitamin D

Five Easy Ways To Get Your Dose Of Vitamin D

Did you know that vitamin D is the most common vitamin deficiency in the world? It’s one of the most difficult for us to get as it’s not always in the first foods you reach for. But a lack of vitamin D can cause you some serious health issues. So here are five of the best ways to get more vitamin D into your body.

Sunlight

Vitamin D is known as the ‘sunshine vitamin’, and that’s because we can synthesise the vitamin in our bodies as long as we have direct exposure to sunlight. Unfortunately if you live in a perennially cloudy country like Britain, getting enough sunlight can sometimes be a challenge.

Remember that sun lotions and creams actually block the UV light from penetrating the skin – and whilst that’s generally good for us, it means we can’t absorb the vitamin D. If the sun does pop out then why not spend a little time outside without protection to get a little of the goodness we need.

Fatty fish

Salmon, trout, mackerel and tuna are all great fishy options that are bursting with vitamin D. They also come with the added bonus of omega-3 fatty acids which are great for your heart. Canned tuna does the trick as well.

Supplements

If you’re struggling to get enough vitamin D into your diet or from the sun then you can use daily supplements. Remember, of course, that like vitamins, too much of it can be dangerous for your liver. Always consult your doctor before taking vitamin tablets.

Egg

Eggs are such a versatile option there’s no reason why you can’t get plenty of vitamin D from them. The vitamin is contained all in the yolk so it’s important that you get eat the whole egg and not just the whites.

Beef liver

While maybe not the most attractive option, beef liver does have all the vitamin D you need. It can’t be used in many things, but it’s cheap and nutritious so there’s no reason not to look up some recipes and get creative.

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Five Easy Ways To Get Your Dose Of Vitamin D

Categories: fatty fish, sunshine, Vitamin D