Which Supplements Are Vital for Your Bones, Baby and Belly?

Nutrition is vital to female wellness, whether you’re working on the wellbeing of your bones, belly or future baby. The good news is, with a healthy, balanced diet you’re already getting everything you need, says Women’s Health Nutrition Expert and Registered Dietitian Keri Glassman : ‘We get a wide variety of nutrients from eating fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and healthy fats, often in perfect proportions. We rarely over or under do it.’

 

Still, sometimes you need a little extra nutrient power here and there, and that’s where supplements come in. You might need to take certain vitamins or minerals if you’re unwell, pregnant or a vegetarian, or as an insurance policy for those times you eat a bag of doughnuts for breakfast instead of your usual whole-wheat toast. According to Glassman, ‘When considering supplements, women need to think bones, babies, and bellies. Sufficient bone density is needed to prevent osteoporosis, an adequate store of folate is essential for fertility and foetal development, and a healthy waistline lowers the risk of cardiovascular disease and other chronic diseases. Women must also load up on the nutrients that are essential to prevent chronic diseases in the future.’

 

Bones – As you were told as a kid, calcium is vital for keeping bones strong, but your need for it doesn’t stop just because you’ve stopped growing. Mary Ellen Camire, PhD, a nutrition professor at the University of Maine at Orono, explains, ‘Women start losing bone density in their twenties. Calcium is your single best defence, and you should start taking it now.’

 

Babies – If you’re pregnant, folate is absolutely essential. A deficiency in this B vitamin can lead to serious complications, such as your baby being born prematurely or with neural tube defects. Taking 600mg of folate when pregnant can reduce your baby’s chances of neural tube defects by 72-100%!

 

Belly – As the most studied and most active antioxidant in green tea, epigallocatechin-3-gallate (EGCG) may help reduce your waistline by fighting weight-causing free radicals. Plus, the antioxidant properties of green tea work to lower your cholesterol (which reduces your heart disease risk) and may help prevent the development and growth of skin tumors.

Categories: Baby, bone density, bones, calcium, Chronic Diseases, folate, green tea, nbsp, neural tube, Supplements, tube defects, Women

Can Vitamin B Boost the Effects of Your Antidepressants?

If your mental wellness is affected by depression, your doctor may prescribe you antidepressants to help you cope. However, you may have to go through a variety of medications before you find the one that improves your wellbeing, and, even when you find one, the benefits may decrease over time. This is why more and more doctors are prescribing a form of folate for depressed patients.

Folate, which occurs naturally in foods such as leafy vegetables, legumes, and nuts, is a water-soluble B vitamin, whilst its synthetic form is known as folic acid. Studies have shown that, if you have low levels of folate, you are six times more likely to respond poorly to antidepressants than those with normal levels. This is because folate is necessary for cell growth and brain function. Your body converts it into an active form, known as L-methylfolate, which you need to produce serotonin, dopamine and norepinephrine. These are neurotransmitters which are essential for mood regulation.

Your L-methylfolate levels can reduce with ageing, genetics, illness, poor nutrition, excess alcohol consumption, and some medications. Antidepressants often work by making serotonin or norepinephrine available to your brain for longer, but this whole process may be less effective or ineffective if your brain is not producing enough of the neurotransmitters in the first place. So, you need to increase your folate intake.

Aside from the previously mentioned dietary sources of folate, you can boost your neurotransmitter production with cereals, baked goods, okra, asparagus, fruits such as bananas, melons, and lemons, yeast, mushrooms, organ meat such as liver and kidney, orange juice, and tomato juice. Another cost-effective way to up your endorphin activity is with exercise.

However, if you need an extra folate boost, Deplin is a prescription version of the B vitamin which has been on the market since 2006. Recently, it has been found that Deplin is beneficial to individuals who do not improve after being placed on an antidepressant. One study gave 75 patients either a placebo or 15 milligrams of Deplin along with an antidepressant and, after 30 days, 32% of subjects on Deplin had responded, compared with 15% on the placebo. Consult your doctor for more information.

Can Vitamin B Boost the Effects of Your Antidepressants?

Categories: Antidepressant, antidepressants, Brain, deplin, depression, folate, form

Could B Vitamins Have Power to Help Psychiatric Problems?

If you have a version of a key gene in B vitamin folate metabolisation, it could make a huge difference to your mental wellness. This is according to a new study, which found that the gene could help you to better respond to vitamin supplements intended to treat negative symptoms of schizophrenia.

After tracking 140 people with schizophrenia for 16 weeks, the researchers discovered that those with the so-called high-functioning FOLH1 gene variant were more responsive to folic acid and B12 supplements, compared to those with the low-functioning FOLH1 variant. Dr Joshua Roffman, the study’s lead author from Massachusetts General Hospital in Charlestown, explained, ‘That’s a gene that actually controls the digestion of folate (or folic acid) into the bloodstream.’

Folate is a B vitamin used for manufacturing neurotransmitters. These send signals throughout your brain and body, and can be obtained through your diet from leafy vegetables, citrus fruits, beans and fortified grain products. However, a deficiency in this B vitamin can drastically affect your mental wellbeing, as Roffman noted that, since the 1960s, folate deficiencies have been tied to the development of schizophrenia, with spikes in cases of the mental disorder being observed after famines in China and the Netherlands, for example.

However, this study, which was published in JAMA Psychiatry, is the first to look at the effects of folate supplements in a large population of people with the condition – covering several medical centres in Massachusetts, New York and Michigan. It targeted so-called negative symptoms in schizophrenia patients, which include apathy, withdrawal and an inability to display emotion. There are more well-known and severe symptoms of schizophrenia, such as hallucinations, delusions and paranoia, but the ones the researchers evaluated can still lead to significant impairment, because they are unaffected by traditional antipsychotic drugs.

The study found that those with the high-functioning version of the FOLH1gene seemed to be able to process the supplements best, and saw their negative symptom score drop by about 5 points, compared to no significant change in the placebo group members with high-functioning FOLH1 genes. Roffman noted, ‘The level of symptom change we saw in this study would be detectable… but it’s definitely a modest change.’

Dr Scott Stroup, a professor of psychiatry at New York’s Columbia University who was not involved with the research, ‘There’s nothing that’s widely accepted that’s demonstrated to help. So there is a big need for this kind of work.’  However, Stroup added, ‘I think the impact on negative symptoms was pretty small, but the paper itself is important.’

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Could B Vitamins Have Power to Help Psychiatric Problems?

Categories: folate, high-functioning FOLH1 gene variant, Research