1. What kind of vitamins,minerals,proteins do we need to take daily
What kind of vitamins,minerals,proteins do we need to take daily ? Where and how can we get them?

2. Vitamins and Minerals: How Much Should You Take?
How much of a vitamin or mineral supplement should you take? Are your daily multivitamins enough, or should you worry about vitamin deficiency? Could you already be taking too much? It can be hard to tell -- especially with so many nutritional terms, abbreviations, and numbers out there. Here’s what you need to know.
To help people better understand the minimum and maximum doses for supplements, the Institute of Medicine has established some guidelines.
The RDA (Recommended Dietary Allowance) and the AI (Adequate Intake) are the amounts of a vitamin or mineral you need to stay healthy and avoid nutritional deficiencies. They are tailored to women, men, and specific age groups.
The UL (Tolerable Upper Intake Level) is the maximum amount of daily vitamins and minerals that you can safely take without risking an overdose or serious side effects. For certain nutrients, the higher you go above the UL, the greater the chance of having problems.
Separate from the RDA and the UL, the FDA uses a different measurement of nutritional intake.
The DV (Daily Value) is the only measurement you’ll find on food and supplement labels. That’s because space is limited, and there’s a need for one single reference number. That number is the amount of a vitamin or nutrient that a person should get for optimum health from a 2,000 calories-a-day diet. The DV is sometimes the same as the RDA and sometimes not.

3. Vitamins and Minerals: How Much Is Too Much?
Because high doses of some supplements can have risks, how do you know when it’s OK to take more than the RDA or DV and when it isn’t?
One way is to look for the UL (tolerable upper intake level) of a nutrient. The Institute of Medicine sets the UL after reviewing studies of that nutrient.
With many vitamins and minerals, you can safely take a dose much higher than the RDA or DV without coming close to the UL. For instance, the average person can take more than 50 times the RDA of vitamin B6 without reaching the upper limit. However, some people develop neuropathy symptoms with these higher levels of B6. So you should always be cautious. Here are some things to keep in mind.
Some supplements are riskier than others. With some vitamins and minerals, the upper limit is pretty close to the RDA. So it’s easy to get too much. For example, a man taking just over three times the RDA of vitamin A would be taking more than the upper limit. High doses of vitamin A -- and other fat-soluble vitamins like E and K -- can build up in the body and cause toxicity. Other risky supplements include the minerals iron and selenium.
Supplements are designed to supplement the diet.  Popping dietary supplements is not the answer to good health. Experts recommend eating a well-balanced, healthy diet and taking supplements to fill in any nutritional gaps. Or you can take a once-daily multivitamin with minerals for nutritional insurance.

4. PROTEINS:  Body building, growth  and repair of damaged tissues are the major role of proteins although they can also be a source of energy and be converted to body fat if not used during activities.  Meats that are lean, cheese, eggs, dairy products (milk) and a little from bread, beans and peas – these are all sources of proteins for our diet.
FATS:  Another supply of energy comes from the group called ’fats’ and obviously if we don’t use up the chemical energy that is contained in them our bodies try to build up a ‘store’ for future use – just in case we run out of them in our diets – this means we store them as ’body-fat’.

5. VITAMINS:   There are many different classes of vitamins and you will have heard of ones like Vitamin C, in fruit.  Without vitamins many of our body processes cannot be done as well as they might.  Building bones and strong teeth is one example you will certainly have heard of.  In times when foods that contained vitamins weren’t available – such as on long early sea voyages – problems associated with deforming bones and poor teeth were well known.  It became essential to visit islands to get fresh supplies of fruit and vegetables whenever possible.  You can probably just go into the kitchen !  When vitamins were first identified they were classed into two groups – one called vitamin A – this was soluble in fat – and the other was vitamin B that was soluble in water.  Other vitamins were found as time went by and these were labelled with other
CARBOHYDRATES:  We have said that ‘Food is Fuel’ and is a store  of chemical
letters – C, D, E and so on.  You may have heard of B1, B2 etc – well this came about because the class of vitamins into just one group of B was too broad. There were actually many separate ones that were discovered later that were found to be soluble in water – hence the numbered vitamins in the B-group.

6. MINERALS: Minerals are things like Zinc, Iron, Magnesium, Calcium, etc
MINERALS:  Minerals are things like Zinc, Iron, Magnesium, Calcium, etc.  They are all minerals found in the world around us – not surprising that we need them for all the chemical processes that go on inside us!  Iron is essential for our blood to be able to carry oxygen round  the body – and without oxygen our muscles can’t work properly. If you have ever walked around at very high altitudes (where there is less oxygen in the atmosphere) you will know how breathless you can get. We get Iron from some green vegetables, liver, beef &lots of other sources. It is best eaten from different foods -some don’t let us absorb it quite so easily by just eating  those foods.

7. Created by Dicianu Andreea