Everything You Need to Know About Vitamins and Supplements

Poor work-life balance may lead to chronic stress, which can impact your mental health as well as your physical health. With stress level rising, people start looking for ways to boost their immune system and get proper nutrition. Even despite your best efforts to eat a healthy and well-balanced diet, you may be falling short of the recommended daily amount of certain nutrients.

Many people start considering taking vitamin supplements to get their recommended intake of those missing nutrients. Wellness experts say supplements play an important function into your physical, mental and emotional well-being. Supplements can fill the nutritional gap in your diet and promise to improve your health. 

Essential Nutrients for Your Body

Vitamins and minerals are essential nutrients your body needs to stay healthy. They work in symphony to maintain your general health, support mental and sports-related performance and provide immune system support. They are essential for healthy vision, skin, and bones.

Eating a healthy, well-balanced diet is the best way to get all the vitamins and minerals you need each day. Fruits and vegetables, whole grains, low-fat dairy products, lean meats, fish, and poultry are the best choices for getting the nutrients your body needs.|

Nothing beats the nutrient power of a healthy diet, however, your body requires at least 30 vitamins, minerals, and dietary components that it needs for proper functioning but cannot manufacture on its own in sufficient amounts.

Hence, adding vitamin supplements is essential. They will enhance the benefits already provided by eating a well-balanced diet, thus helping your body to function properly.

Supplements may be especially beneficial for certain groups of people, including pregnant women, women in menopause, vegans, vegetarians and people with food allergies or even chronic conditions who may need higher levels of certain nutrients or whose diets may restrict the intake of certain nutrients.

According to nutritionists, the best vitamin supplements to take to help meet your nutritional needs include a daily multivitamin, or individual vitamin or mineral such as vitamin A, C and D, zinc, magnesium, and probiotics. Other vitamin supplements include B-complex vitamins, folid acid supplements, minerals such as iron and calcium.

Getting the right dose is crucial. Certain vitamins and minerals can do more harm than good when it comes to your health if you are taking too much or taking them for too long. Your body needs vitamins and minerals in small amounts to work properly and that’s why they are often called micronutrients. So consult with your doctor about all the medicines and supplements you need to take and potential interactions, and always use them exactly as directed on the label, or as prescribed by your doctor.

The Difference Between Vitamins and Supplements

You might be asking yourselves what the difference is, if anything, between vitamins and supplements. Well, the actual difference between the two is that supplements is a broad term used to refer to any product that adds nutritional value to your diet or improve your health, while vitamins are just a type of supplement. Other types of supplements include minerals, herbs, or nutrients like fiber.

Supplements come in a few forms, including pill, powder and liquid. They are not intended to replace your meal. Vitamins and supplements can help you combat a vitamin deficiency or lower your risk of certain diseases. They can protect you when you are experiencing stress, or sleeping poorly. Or you might consider taking supplements to boost your energy levels  for better workouts.

Vitamins are organic compounds that play a vital role in the body, and not getting enough of them can cause health problems and diseases. There are 13 essential vitamins that your body needs for proper functioning, including vitamins A, C, B6, and D.

Actually, vitamins fall into two categories - fat soluble and water soluble. While many vitamins, including C and the B-complex vitamins are water-soluble and can pass through your body with relatively mild side effects, fat-soluble vitamins such as vitamin A, D and E can build up to toxic levels over time. So you need a fresh supply of these vitamins every day.

Common Essential Supplements and Their Benefits

Here are few examples of common essential supplements you may need:

Multivitamins

There isn’t one specific supplement that is the magic pill for boosting immunity and energy. However, you can consider taking a daily multivitamin if you feel your diet isn’t filled with a colorful array of fruits and vegetables. Multivitamins are supplements that contain a combination of many vitamins and minerals that are not taken in through the diet.

Their nutrient composition varies by brand and product. However, according to nutritionists, there are several ingredients a multivitamin should have. No matter what brand you choose, a multivitamin should contain vitamin D, magnesium, calcium, zinc, iron, folate and vitamin B-12.

Vitamin A, C and D

You have probably heard that carrots are good for your eyes. Well, that’s true - carrots are full of substances called carotenoids that your body converts into vitamin A, which helps prevent eye problems. Vitamin A can slow down vision loss from age-related macular degeneration.

Vitamin C is also very important for your health. It acts as a powerful antioxidant and has anti-inflammatory activity. Vitamin C helps to fight free radical damage caused by the environment, processed foods, and stress, which eventually causes cellular damage. The best way to get vitamin C is through fresh fruits and vegetables, but you can’t beat the convenience of a vitamin supplement.

Vitamin D is hard to come by in food and while you can get it from sunshine, most people don’t get sufficient, unexposed sun time. So you might consider taking vitamin D supplement instead. Vitamin D strengthens bones and supports a healthy immune system, and supplementation has been shown to protect against respiratory infections.

Zinc

There are several forms of zinc supplements, available in capsule, tablet, and lozenge form that help your immune system and metabolism to function. Also, zinc has a number of additional benefits. It helps speed up the healing of wounds, improve brain function, and helps the treatment of acne and promote skin health. Like vitamin A, zinc slow down vision loss from age-related macular degeneration.

Magnesium

Magnesium is an important mineral that is crucial for your body’s function. People get magnesium from their diet. Foods that are high in fiber are generally good magnesium source. However, if magnesium levels are too low, magnesium supplements are needed. They are available in a variety of forms, including magnesium oxide, citrate, and chloride. Magnesium supplements may help with muscle and nerve function, regulates blood pressure, keeps bones strong, and the heart rhythm steady, and supports the immune system.

Probiotics

Probiotics can be consumed in fermented foods like sauerkraut, kefir and yogurt. However, probiotic supplements can come in handy if you want to add an extra boost to your gut health and digestive health, hence maintaining the integrity of your GI tract. Taking probiotic pills can help relieve diarrhea, gas and bloating.

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How to Increase Shelving Safety in Your Warehouse

 One is tempted to discard safety concerns in a warehouse as inconsequential. Accidents will happen anyway – and staff will be responsible for it, that is what a layman would think. While those that are not involved in warehouse management can perpetuate this fallacy, the warehouse safety professionals should know better.

The workforce in a warehouse is exposed to numerous risks, most of which can be mitigated by putting a proper work safety system in place. The accidents and injuries are costly in more than one way and management should put an effort to better organize the work. Many incidents can be be avoided, if due diligence is done.

Introduce Weight Limits on Shelves

Industrial shelving systems handle all kinds of loads. Cutting costs may encourage warehouse managers to put as much goods on as little space as possible. While this makes good fiscal logic in the short term, it can lead to dire safety performance in the long run. To counter this unsafe practice work on enforcing weight limits within your premises.

You can easily find heavy duty shelf unit with capacity to hold up to 400 kg of load per shelf (if they are evenly distributed). This should be more than enough to stock your products in a safe manner. Pushing the shelf past its carrying capacity means that you are asking for trouble. The ultimate way this will manifest should not come as a surprise to you.

Choose appropriate type of shelf for the products you stock. The heavy duty longspan shelving systems are quite versatile and will allow you to store smaller units. They are perfect for storing archives full of documents, or racks with all sorts of tiny electrical equipment you can imagine. Some have wire shelves, while other offer adjustable height of shelves.

If you work with big shelves or pallet racks you should work on preventing objects from falling. Sometimes whole racks fall and this is not fun, not by any means. Respect weight capacity to have safer shelves in your warehouse.

Work on Forklift Injuries Prevention

Warehouse workforce becomes too comfortable or complacent in using large machinery. This results in damage to property or injury to staff. It is a complex issue.

You can start working on this problem by making sure only trained staff operates forklifts and similar machines. And those that do hold a permission to use them, have to be aware of their responsibility. Operating them under the influence (even some prescription drugs affect performance) should never take place. And something as innocent as a late evening snooze behind the forklift wheel can lead to mayhem throughout the whole building. To avoid this make sure you maintain enough staff so they can rotate appropriately. Well rested and trained fork-lifters are less likely to cause an accident.

Resist the urge to economize warehouse space. Make your aisles as wide as possible so that your staff will have maneuverable space. This is especially important if more than one forklift are working in roughly the same space. Having some slack will gear you towards increased safety. Tidy up any loose loads and ensure the warehouse is well lit. Large operation centers should consider introducing signal system or even ramps and bumpers to avoid collision and incidents.

Put Someone in Charge of Warehouse Safety

It can be an in house cadre with long experience or you can hire safety management professional. Studying accident reports make it obvious that when things go wrong responsibility shifts very fast. Safety analysts may come to the conclusion that many people among your ranks failed to fulfill their responsibility. What is the purpose of this if the accident already happened? If you have one person that is tasked to supervise warehouse safety then everyone knows where is the loose end.

Give them specific duties. They should be authorized to conduct up-close inspections for wet floors, damaged equipment, issues with lights and other potential hazards. Every single heavy duty shelf unit should be inspected for signs of corrosion, missing clips and bolts or bending shelves. Your work safety manager should walk through aisles on a regular basis and spot damage to stairs and ladders before they pose a problem.

Unreported damage and forklift accidents are not the only target of your safety professional. They need to keep an eye on safety violations among the staff. Turning a blind eye to unsafe practices by your experienced staff doesn’t do a favor to anyone. Inconspicuous workers behavior can become a problem later on, for example driving the forklift too fast.

Make Periodical Assessments the Norm

Safety always rests on layers of fail safe systems. Your supervisors provide very important feedback, yet they might overlook issues. Bring in a fresh set of eyes once in a while to assess the integrity of your work safety system. Find someone that is able to spot vulnerabilities in your safety management before someone gets hurt. Or before you spend a lot of money cleaning up after shelf rack collapse. Outside consultants can also propose a set of measures designed to improve your safety. New technologies emerge every day. What if there is a way to stop a forklift from hitting a shelf by installing a software? What if a sound alarm is activated when someone fails to take safety precaution – the way cars inform drivers that their passengers are not using the safety belt?

Keep an eye on these kind of breakthroughs for they can save you a lot of money in the long run.

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The Best and the Worst Sugar Substitutes to Buy

When the first no-calorie sugar substitute was released, it was seen as the solution-to-eaten caloric foods. People became finally allowed to eat their favourite cake and still be able to fit in their skinny jeans. But that was only until researches found out that the new-go-sugar was linked to cancer and made many to rethink about those promising packets. The scary news didn't stop new sugar substitutes from hitting the shelves. Many more sugar substitutes were released after that, promising individuals zero calories and the same sweet taste as real sugar. However, a study at Purdue University in West Lafayette found that lab animals given foods sweetened with artificial sweetener actually gained more weight than those who consumed regular sugar.

Essential Things You Should Know When Buying Natural Body Products

Did you know that people on average apply five to ten different products on their skin each day? And more often than not, these products are full of harsh synthetic ingredients which might not only be unsuitable for your skin type but can also cause numerous health issues. That being said, those who want to avoid making their skin absorb hundreds of chemicals on daily basis opt for natural body care products.

Face Cleanser: Essential Product in Your Skincare Routine

When it comes to skincare, not everyone has won the genetic lottery - some need to work hard for a shiny, glossy complexion. Even those who are gifted with clear skin still have to maintain it.

Skincare has become a very important routine in our lives. From cleansing to toning and moisturising, every step is essential, and shouldn’t be overlooked.