Try to achieve a balanced vitamin intake, nutrition experts say
Pennsylvania junior Jeff Barrett has been taking a multivitamin every day since high school and believes every student should care more about their vitamin intake.
"Most college students don't care," he said. "They take what they find."
That kind of whatever-you-can-find approach actually does no good, nutrition experts say. In fact, the unbalanced mix-and-match vitamin content in energy drinks, for example, can often do more harm than good.
A healthy diet is one of those things that falls by the wayside for many students due to limited means and hectic schedules. Still, students should be educated on what they eat, said Roschelle Heuberger, an associate professor of nutrition and registered dietician.
Need a good rule of thumb? "Never take a formulation that gives you more than 100 percent of the daily intake," she said.
Barrett feels the multivitamin capsule is all anyone really needs, because it offers just enough of everything.
"If you took another specific vitamin it would be too much for the body to handle," Barrett said.
With the recession, fewer people have health insurance and are spending more money on vitamins to try to prevent illness, said J.W. Hollingsworth, store manager at GNC. 2155 S. Mission St.
Hollingsworth said he sees a lot of college students, and lately he has seen more females visiting the store.
Males usually come in to get supplements to help them build muscle, but females are coming in to simply stay healthy, he said.
Tara Cuthbertson, a Port Huron senior, said she takes flaxseed oil, which helps with stress; a B-complex, a health and mood booster, and blue-green algae, which replaces all the grain she would need for a day.
"Whether it's the power of the mind or not, it works," she said.
Vitamin and mineral production is not regulated by the Food and Drug Administration, so people need to be aware of what they are buying, Heuberger said.
The body can become dependent on getting nutrients in that way, which is unnatural. If individuals take too much, when they stop taking the supplement, their body thinks it has a deficiency, Heuberger said.
"The biggest concerns that I have are people using energy drinks," she said. "They tend to have really, really high levels of certain things, and not of everything, which causes a lot of imbalances."
university@cm-life.com
