Adequate nutrition consists in providing the organism with nutrients it needs to live in health.

 

Nutrients are chemical substances contained in food from the body which will form cellular structures and tissue metabolism, and energy elements it needs for proper functioning. Food not only affects health but has an active role in preventing many diseases and in the treatment of others.

 

Complexity of the human organism causes many physiological situations (pregnancy, intense exercise, ...) have specific nutritional requirements for proper operation and functional development; and in unphysiological although very frequent situations (diseases, nutritional and metabolic imbalances).

 

Currently, there is widespread awareness of the need to have a healthy and balanced diet to live well and be in good shape. But the way we live has changed considerably in recent decades and thus our food. The form and type of work increasingly with less energy consumption and more sedentary, fast and factors such as stress, numerous slimming diets become fashionable and pollution foods can alter our nutritional balance and makes eating a balanced way comes to be an elusive goal in many cases. In these circumstances and needs comes the use of supplements or food supplements.

 

The legislation refers to food supplements as concentrated sources of nutrients (vitamins and minerals) or other substances with a nutritional or physiological alone or in combination effects, which are marketed in dosage form (eg capsules, tablets, sachets of powder , etc.), whose purpose is to supplement a normal diet. Therefore they are excluding medicinal products as are defined by official regulations.

 

In situations of nutritional deficiencies specific supplements can help improve health, providing those nutrients and micro-nutrients that are lacking in that situation.

 

For all supplements are known vitamins, minerals, proteins, amino acids, polyunsaturated fatty acids, fiber, antioxidants, etc., and the benefits they provide to protect the body of the deficiencies, and as a method to prevent certain diseases, and recover from other.

 

A supplement may Therefore work on several fronts:

 

• Prevention of deficiencies and diseases.

 

• The correction of some nutrient deficiency.

 

• The provision of optimal levels of a nutrient or substance necessary for the proper functioning of cells, tissues, organs and body systems.

 

IMPORTANT NOTE:

• Food supplements should never replace a balanced diet as they are, as the name suggests, complements this in certain situations.

 

• Supplements are not medicines and therefore pathological situations can not replace drugs but supplement or facilitate the action of these.