How much of each vitamin​ does your body need daily?

Perhaps you have memories of your parents giving you a lecture about vitamins. As you have aged, you know the role vitamins and minerals plays in our bodies. Our body extracts vitamins from the foods we eat and it does it well. That’s partly why a person can appear healthy on less than adequate food.

Do you feel sluggish, have brain fog, get tired from walking down the stairs and more? It’s possible you have some underlying illness, but when was the last time you checked your vitamin intake? Some vitamins are easier to obtain than others depending on your diet.

My Supplement Picks

While diet is the ideal place to get your recommended vitamins, supplements can help. I prefer to take whole food multivitamins as the vitamins are extracted from whole foods. Many people say differently about vitamins that it doesn’t matter where it comes from, and maybe it doesn’t. But, my philosophy is closer to nature is better.

Pregnancy

I am sure you have heard of stories where women do not realize that they are pregnant until the third trimester or later. The surprising part is that even without any additional nutrients during pregnancy, the baby is healthy. How can that be? Well, first of all, a woman’s fetus gets priority. So the baby will get nutrients from all the nutrients from body stores and will get first dibs on nutrients you eat.

Women who have easy access to food and are not malnourished can be healthy enough to support her fetus without additional supplements. The woman’s body would suffer the consequences, however. When I was pregnant, I couldn’t get enough of fruits and vegetables, yet I was still low in iron. I felt fine and had no visible effects of being low in iron.

My baby would continue to pull the iron from my body and diet, and I would be the one to suffer from the effects of that. The bad part is, some of the issues would be long term. So mothers who didn’t know they were pregnant until it’s time for birth may have some long-term problems with their own bodies.

A supplement is therefore important when you are pregnant, mor so for the woman than the unborn child.

So how much vitamins does our body need?

This handy table, derived from the Institute of medicine will give you the required nutrient requirement. It might be difficult to measure just how much of this nutrient you are getting from food, but it can also help when you need to select a supplement.

You can also see the macronutrients and mineral requirements.

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• RDA = Recommended Dietary Allowance
• AI = Adequate Intake

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