Taking supplements for health balance

Several years ago my mother did a yearly medical check-up, and she found that she was at risk of osteoporosis, a disease that bone has become weak and brittle. The one of suggestions from her physician is she should consider taking some supplements which include vitamin D and calcium to increase the level of bone mass. Yet, she seems to not like taking supplements, which the size of pills is normally big, because she prefers natural nutrients to synthesized ones which she is also not sure whether they are safe enough.

According to “Everyone 'should take vitamin D pills'” (2015), Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition (SACN) recommends that everybody should take vitamin D tablets to prevent from deficiency, especially in the period of winter that sunlight level is low, and people are at risk to face with the lack of getting vitamin D from the action of sunshine through their skin, because general suggestion for taking enough vitamin D is focused on some particular groups—pregnant women, people are under five and over 65 years of age. Moreover, National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) also requires more free supplements and supermarkets to sell cheaper pills.

Unlike Thailand, UK and some countries has low level of sunlight during winter months, leading to the risk of deficiency of vitamin D. It would be helpful for British to take care and prevent themselves from rickets and brittle bones as suggested in the article. However, Thai people are still facing with those diseases even though sunshine level is quite high throughout all of seasons. This is because someone do not have eat unsuitable food—lack of vitamin D and calcium, someone have incomplete vitamin-absorbed system in their body, someone are pregnant, all children need vitamin D and calcium for growth and development of their bone and so on. All of these are why we need to take supplements to ensure that we get vitamin D and even others enough.

Yet, I agree with the content in the article to some extent because every coin has two sides. Sometimes people are not aware of using vitamin D and even other vitamins in the form of supplements and overuse them, thus likely to be dangerous to their health and life. To illustrate, high amount of vitamins would accumulate in a body until it causes acute kidney injury or liver failure—both kidney and liver are main innards of excretory system in a body. On the contrary, if consumers realize and understand correctly how to take them appropriately, they will not only bring health benefits, but also save one’s money from treatment of possible severe diseases in the future. 

These days it is somewhat usual practice for several groups of people in the world to take supplements for health balance. Current business of vitamin and nutritional supplements has been rapidly growing and providing varied forms of product—tablets, food, beverages and etc.—to cover a wide variety of customer targets. However, some of products have low quality and/or are sold expensively. People should be aware of these, where authority and organization relating to drug and food should inspect and control the standards and price of supplements. In addition, it is also significant to offer free supplements to some groups of people who are destitute and in the remote areas which they are difficult to buy. Should Thai government and ministry of public health pay more attention to this issue or promote eating clean, beneficial food and regular exercise instead?

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Reference

Everyone 'should take vitamin D pills'. (2015, August 3). BBC News. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.com/news/health-33757929