Your body needs vitamins, minerals, and nutrients so you can be the best you possible. That’s why a Multivitamin is advised daily during the Pure 21 Wellness Challenge. You may know from the nutrition guide or supplement label that the Multivitamin helps support the immune system, increase energy, and improve exercise recovery time. However, you may still be left with some lingering questions, especially if you have done “your own research” about multivitamins and their efficacy.
It’s clear from the first couple pages of Google that opinions differ around whether multivitamins are necessary and there’s a debate on their effectiveness. Some believe they’re totally superfluous, some believe they’re not necessary if you eat right, and some say they’re imperative to your health. So, what’s the deal? And how does the Pure 21 Wellness Challenge Multivitamin supplement help you?
The purpose of multivitamins
As with all dietary supplements, like our Daily Probiotic and Digestive Enzymes (which you can read blogs about here), the intention of multivitamins is not to replace eating fruits and vegetables. In other words, you can’t simply subsist on doughnuts and ice cream and think that taking a multivitamin will provide you with enough nutrients to offset the unhealthy things you’re putting in your body. Multivitamins are designed to supplement the vitamins and minerals you get from the foods you eat every day, especially fruits and veggies. Therefore, their purpose is to fill in nutritional gaps and add support, not replace the need for healthy foods.
So yes, to address the argument from the anti-multivitamin establishments out there, multivitamins do not necessarily contain a high dose of vitamins and minerals relative to what can be found in food. However, most people do not eat enough fruits and vegetables every day. In fact, according to the CDC, only 12% of people eat the recommended amount of fruits each day, and just 9% of people eat enough vegetables. When you don’t eat enough fruits and vegetables, you don’t get enough vitamins and minerals to keep your immune system running properly, energy high, and recovery time low.
You read that right. 88% of people don’t eat enough fruits and 91% of people don’t eat enough vegetables. So, about 90% of people are not getting the proper amount of vitamins and minerals, in which case you should be taking some kind of supplemental multivitamin to help fill in the gaps.
NOTE: To be clear, the Pure 21 Wellness Challenge lays out meal plans that will deliver you the proper amount of fruits and vegetables. However, not everyone can meet those goals, nor will they keep up with this diet after their 21 days. Our Multivitamin supplement is designed to help you get enough vitamins and minerals whether you’re meeting your recommended amount of fruits and veggies or coming up shy.
How do multivitamins help you?
Vitamins play important roles in our bodies, from providing us with energy, keeping our skin healthy, and helping our hair grow to reinforcing our bones and helping our blood clot. When we don’t get enough vitamins, it starts to take a toll on our physical (and sometimes mental) health. Our bodies cannot produce many vitamins, so the only other way to get them is through food or supplements. There are two main kinds of vitamins: fat soluble and water soluble. Fat-soluble vitamins are stored in the body’s fat when they’re not immediately used, so they can be used later. However, water-soluble vitamins pass through the system if they are not used immediately, so this type of vitamin must be replenished each day. Let’s look below at which vitamins fall into these categories.
Fat-Soluble Vitamins
- Vitamin A
- Vitamin D
- Vitamin E
- Vitamin K
Water-Soluble Vitamins
- Vitamin C
- Thiamin (vitamin B1)
- Riboflavin (vitamin B2)
- Niacin (vitamin B3)
- Vitamin B6
- Vitamin B12
- Folacin (vitamin B9)
With this list, we can see that water-soluble vitamins greatly outnumber fat-soluble vitamins. Therefore, there are more vitamins that you should be taking daily than those than can be stored in your body’s fat. While fat-soluble vitamins do play important roles in your body – vitamin D is responsible for healthy bones, vitamin K is responsible for blood clotting, and so on – water-soluble vitamins also play crucial roles in our bodies and need to be ingested far more frequently than fat-soluble ones. For instance, vitamin C is responsible for protecting your cells from free radicals – molecules that become present due to X-Rays, smoking tobacco, sun damage, etc. The rest of the water-soluble vitamins are all part of the B group of vitamins, which are responsible for turning food/nutrients into energy, keeping hair and skin healthy, and helping produce red blood cells, which help you recover from injury or soreness. There is no harm if someone takes more Vitamin C, Vitamin B or other water-soluble vitamins daily. Because they cannot be stored by the body they will be excreted through urine.
Most people need a supplemental multivitamin such as our Multivitamin to fill in nutritional gaps. Multivitamins are responsible for helping deliver extra doses of fat-soluble and water-soluble vitamins to your system. Because water-soluble vitamins are passed through your body if they are not utilized, it is imperative to get enough of these vitamins every day. Taking a multivitamin will help with this. Our Multivitamin contains over 25 vitamins and minerals, including the most necessary water-soluble vitamins like vitamin C and all B-group vitamins. Vitamin C is responsible for keeping your cells healthy and acting as an antioxidant that helps quell the negative effects of free radicals, while B-group vitamins are responsible for turning the food you eat into energy, keeping skin and hair healthy, and helping you recover from injury. Therefore, even if you are currently doing the Pure 21 Wellness Challenge and strictly follow the diet recommendations, it will still be beneficial to get into the habit of ingesting supplemental vitamins daily so that you have developed this technique as part of your new, healthy lifestyle. Then, you’ll start seeing results, like increased energy, a boosted immune system, and quicker recovery times, especially if you are exercising more with your new lifestyle.