Medications can deplete your body of nutrients

Nutrition is an important part of staying healthy and these days good nutrition involves feeding your body nutrients via taking adequate supplements to make up for the pollution and denatured food on our planet. There are many reasons we don’t always get our full supply of nutrition. Sometimes even when we eat well, we find out we are malnourished. It has to do with how much you are actually absorbing from the foods you eat. Also, medication can be responsible for minerals and vitamins being sucked out of our systems at a faster rate than we can absorb them and we end up deficient.

Some medications can interfere with the absorption of the natural nutrients you may think you are getting through your diet. This can then cause health problems that you wouldn’t think would be caused by those medications because they are “supposed” to make you better. It is important to keep a list of all your medications and their dosage in your bag, phone or wallet and the dates you started taking them for emergency situations. This also helps you keep check so you don’t overuse your medication.

It is important to know what your medication is used for and not to just take it blindly. Check with your doctor or pharmacist as to the side effects so if you feel unwell, you can decipher if it’s a result of the medication or you genuinely are unwell. If you use the same pharmacist every time, they will keep track of it for you. Always check to see if medications conflict with each other as this can make you very sick.

Many medications, while treating one part of your illness, can lead to nutrition deficiencies, which cause headaches, cramping, low immunity, depression and can increase the risk of clots and osteoporosis. You may also suffer from such side effects as fatigue, bone weakness, dermatitis, dry skin and acne.

Some everyday medications that can interfere with absorption include tricyclic antidepressants, which affect the levels of vitamin B2 and coenzyme Q10; aspirin, ibuprofen and naproxen. which affect iron, folate, zincand vitamin C; the anti-diabetes drug metformin, which can affect folate, vitamin B12 and coenzyme Q10; and the contraceptive pill, which can affect the levels of B vitamins, vitamin C, magnesium, selenium and zinc.

Antibiotics can also deplete the body of essential nutrients. Penicillin such as amoxicillin can lower potassium absorption, while tetracycline such as doxycycline has an effect on calcium and magnesium. This is why it is important if you are regularly taking medications to at least take a multivitamin every day as these vitamins are not stored in the body and if you don’t get your quota one day, then your body becomes nutrition deficient on that day. Put all the days that you don’t get your quota together and you build up a lot of nutrition deficiencies, which will make you ill.

Source -Wellbeing