Almost everyone today knows the important role of vitamins and minerals for a healthy life:

CHILDREN: Educated at school about healthy sandwiches and meals

PEDIATRICIANS: Recommend additional vitamin D supplements in winter

PREGNANT WOMEN: Are well informed about a balanced diet and are taught by their doctor about additional vitamins; such as folic acid

SENIORS: Doctors recommending additional intake of calcium tablets

If we have so much knowledge about nutrition, why is it still so difficult nowadays to get enough vitamins, minerals and micronutrients?

There is a big difference between food and nutrition.

Examples of mineral and vitamin loss in recent years

Conclusion:

Still up to date:  – “One apple a day keeps the doctor away”?

Unfortunately, there are many foods that are not healthy for our body and at the same time weaken our immune system. We would like to provide a little insight into this. The list is of course not complete, but it can certainly provide some food for thought.

Sugar
There is much discussion about how harmful sugar can be. However, it is certain that excessive sugar consumption not only causes weight gain, but can also promote the development of bacteria and fungi. This unnecessarily overloads the immune system, too. Highly processed food contains a bunch of industrial sugar and it should therefore not play a central role in our diet. Fortunately, there are now many delicious recipes to be found online that are low in sugar or even sugar-free.

Deep-fried food
Fried foods are bursting with fat and oil and are poison for the immune system. Participants in a study in the USA (90 % men, average age 64) were followed for 3 years and their eating habits were documented. It was striking that the people who ate fried foods the most frequently developed Coronary heart disease (CHD, coronary arteries become too narrow through plaque by supplying oxygen to the heart). The higher the consumption of fried foods, the higher the risk of CHD, which can develop into heart failure, arrhythmia or even a heart attack.

Therefore, it is better to avoid fried foods as much as possible in order to protect our immune system on daily basis.

Alcohol
Contrary to the common opinion that a glass of alcohol now and then can do no harm, many studies show how harmful alcohol consumption is to the body. Above all, regular or excessive consumption cripples the immune system the most.

Not only does it make you more susceptible to infectious diseases, but the hormone system and the liver really suffer from the toxin alcohol.

Salt
Here applies: The dose makes the poison! Salt is essential for a functioning metabolism, but we usually consume far too much of it in everyday life. Pizza, chips, hamburgers, convenience food…

Excessive salt consumption increases blood pressure and weakens the immune system. It is more helpful to prepare your own meals fresh and to use spices and herbs for seasoning.

By the way, our usual Kitchen salt is in fact relatively unhealthy, since all the nutrients that natural salt normally contains have been removed from it during refining.

If you want to change and improve your health, you can start by replacing the “normal” table salt with sea salt. If you want to go one step further, you should switch to Celtic Sea salt or Pink Himalayan salt. These still contain plenty of minerals and trace elements. It is also advisable to prepare a mix of sea salt and Himalayan salt yourself and keep it ready for use in the kitchen.

It is certainly worthwhile to find out more about salt!

Fast Food
Fast, cheap and delicious – fast food has revolutionised the food industry and unfortunately it is very often seen as a pillar of many people’s diets. Almost every single one of the highly processed foods contains large amounts of fat, salt or sugar – or even all three.

The health disadvantages are generally well known and need no longer be explained here.

Food additives
We have already mentioned that convenience foods are unhealthy. They contain countless additives to make the dishes tastier, more colorful, tastier and more durable. Very often, for example, Monosodium glutamate (MSG) and Aspartame are processed, which have really enormous side effects. Among other things, they cause inflammation in the body, trigger allergies and can even damage brain cells. The University of Newcastle has been able to prove through studies that these additives can make existing asthma worse or even cause it.

Conclusion
In summary, we now see that our immune system benefits most from freshly prepared meals or snacks from our own household.

Buying only healthy ingredients is then only a matter of time until it becomes a habit!

Critical research of what is good for our body is definitely the first step. Let’s start getting stronger!

A matter of survival: Water
Water makes up at least 60% of an adult’s body and not a single cell in the body can function without it. Every day, a certain amount of water leaves the body through urine, sweat and exhaled air. If this loss is not compensated, it leads to a decrease in blood volume, since blood is 90% water. This in turn leads to low blood pressure and to the fact that our body stops sweating. However, since sweating is our body’s mechanism against overheating, as a result the body temperature rises until it reaches a critical point.

A healthy person can theoretically go a week without water in cool weather, in practice it is actually usually only 3-4 days!

Under extreme circumstances, such as intense heat or during extreme sports, the body loses as much as 1-1.5 liters of sweat per hour. Without replenishing this lost body fluid immediately, a person would even die within a few hours!

Symptoms of dehydration
Dehydration occurs when our cells and organs use more fluid than our body takes in. Our body gives some signs to drink water as quickly as possible to prevent dehydration:

  • Increased thirst
  • Dry mouth & chapped lips
  • Fatigue & weakness
  • Headache
  • Dizziness
  • Urine that is dark yellow in color
  • Decrease in the amount of urine
  • Chronic constipation
  • Kidney pain
  • Muscle cramps up to heavy seizures

Already at 10% loss of body fluid we reach a critical state of health, which is manifested by extreme physical conditions.

Daily drinking amount
Under normal conditions, the body of an adult loses 2 – 2.5 litres of water every day: through urine, skin, breath and digestion. Depending on the situation, we also lose significantly more fluid: in high temperatures, sports or stress, water loss is much higher. (Small) children and breastfeeding women also need more water than others. In addition, everyone has their own specific metabolism and eating habits. By the way, when sweat flows, water loss can be up to one litre per hour.

As a rule of thumb:

  • If we assume that we lose about 2.5 litres of fluid per day, we should also replenish this amount.
  • We take in about 1 litre of fluid through solid food.
  • The remaining one and a half litres should be drunk.
  • But here, too, it is better to drink a little more than too little. If necessary, the kidneys (in healthy people) will excrete the excess moisture without any problems.

Free radicals
Free radicals have always been an integral part of all organic life and are initially nothing more than a necessary partial reaction of cellular respiration and the associated metabolism. Free radicals are among the causes of numerous diseases and are the reason for the ageing of all biological life.

Our body can even use the destructive powers of the aggressive particles to its own advantage by using them in the course of the immune defense to fight viruses and bacteria.

Free radicals are therefore a normal part of our lives and are only dangerous at exceeding concentrations. Then they cause damage to our cell structure and so-called oxidative stress occurs. This in turn ensures that more and more functional molecules are attacked by the free radicals in a constantly progressing chain reaction and are thus deprived of their functionality. The consequences are restricted cell functions, serious DNA damage, the inhibition of enzyme functions and the destruction of important receptors on the cell surfaces.

The diseases or damages triggered by this are enormously diverse and really illustrate very impressively that Free radicals are involved in almost every malfunction in organic tissue or are even the origin.

Antioxidants
The danger from too many free radicals can be neutralized by antioxidants!

Our body produces a few helpful antioxidants itself, such as glutathione and alpha lipoic acid. The remaining amount we have to consume permanently through food to prevent the cell damage described above. A dietary supplement with antioxidants can be very helpful in everyday life, especially if we have increased contact with toxins from food, cleaning agents, radiation or through the air.

But which foods contain enough antioxidants to protect us sufficiently?

In general, plant foods have up to 33 times more antioxidants than meat products. These substances occur naturally in higher concentrations in the following foods:

  • Vegetables (especially broccoli, carrots, tomatoes, potatoes, onions, avocado).
  • Fruit (especially blueberries, red berries, citrus fruits, pomegranate, acerola)
  • Wild plants (nettle, dandelion, etc.)
  • Salads & sprouts
  • Black tea, coffee
  • Dark chocolate
  • Nuts

Food supplements
If we want to resort to dietary supplements, since we do not eat optimally every day, we should think of the following in the first place:

  • Vitamin E
  • Vitamin C
  • OPC (Grape seed)
  • Zinc

If certain damages are already more advanced, this basic recommendation is of course far from sufficient!

Vitaalia A-Z Multivitamin & Minerals Plus contains all 4 antioxidants in combination with turmeric, which has a strong anti-inflammatory effect and thus also actively protects the cells and the immune system.

Since citrus fruits, Vitamin C, also play a very important role in terms of antioxidants, we recommend high doses of vitamin C for guaranteed cell protection (ideally in addition to the Multivitamin tablets).

By the way, our acid-free powder is extremely suitable for this.

An incredible 3,500 medical indications are associated with a magnesium deficiency!

But who is aware of this in everyday life? — Unfortunately, hardly anyone; especially since there is still a lot of unawareness about this topic.

Therefore, the following is a short list of a few symptoms that can be divided into 3 levels depending on their severity and life-threatening nature.

Early signs of deficiency may include:

  • Nausea
  • Vomiting
  • Weakness
  • Fatigue

Significant magnesium deficiency can cause:

  • Numbness
  • Tingling
  • Muscle twitching and cramps
  • Seizures
  • Cardiac arrhythmias

Threatening magnesium deficiency:

  • Hypocalcemia (calcium deficiency)
  • Hypokalemia (potassium deficiency)
  • Without treatment, this leads to bone-, muscle- and nerve damage or kidney failure and occurrence of ECG changes up to ventricular fibrillation.

We cannot emphasize enough the importance of a regular magnesium supplementation!

Constant stress, poor diet, coffee and cola consumption, taking medicine or too little sleep deplete our magnesium levels in the body. Hardly anyone is not affected by this nowadays.

Did you already know that deep relaxation can be achieved with magnesium? Both physically (muscles, tendons), and mentally in the case of mood swings, dejection or exhaustion. But it not only relaxes, but builds up a stabilising force from within and the well-being comes into balance.

That’s why we also call magnesium the power-relax mineral!

Due to this widespread deficiency and its rather unpleasant consequences, we at Vitaalia have several types of magnesium in our webshop:

  • Vegan tri-magnesium di-citrate capsules (extremely high bioavailability).
  • Magnesium flakes Zechstein
  • Magnesium Gel Zechstein (from travel to refill bottle)
  • Magnesium Spray Zechstein (from travel to refill bottle)