Remember my outrage over ridiculous (and sometimes dangerous) supplement dosages? I ended by saying I was going to be more careful choosing what to take and do my homework. I've done a fair bit of research since then and settled on a regular vitamin routine.
My typical day looks like this:
My typical day looks like this:
None of those are higher than 100% except for iron, because I've had issues with that before (makes it hard to donate blood), and several family members are anemic. Although most of these are water soluble, which means the extra will get peed out and not stored in the body with potentially harmful side effects, I'd still rather stick to less than the recommended amount, because I am getting some of it in my food and I don't see the point in overloading my body with things it doesn't need. Side note: the fat soluble things to avoid megadoses of are Vitamins A, D, E and K. Colorado State University has a great summary that goes into more detail.
The probiotic I talked about before, and now that I've tried it will not being continuing to take once my current bottle runs out. As far as timing, I'd never really thought about it until I ran across this handy dandy infographic about supplement optimization. Basically the only one that impacts me is to not take calcium and iron together, because calcium inhibits iron absorption. Good to know, right?!
The infographic has other information about taking with meals or before, but, knowing myself, I'm not going to time my vitamins, and I'm not going to take them more than twice a day. Plus taking pills on an empty stomach makes me feel so gross and nauseated. Not worth it.
I like my pill minders because I can load them up once a week and not have to worry about getting into all 3 bottles each morning, or the clutter of all that junk on the bathroom counter all the time. I tend to skip weekends just to give my body a little break in case I'm overloading it on something and I'm not always punctual on refill day (speaking of which...).
Overall, though, I like my system, and I like that I know what I'm putting in my body. Anything that allows me to implement some optimization is good, too!
What supplements do you take? Do you have a regular routine?
