A lot doctors and scientists once believed that you don't need to supplement with vitamins if you eat right. Victor Herbert, the outspoken Harvard nutrition scientist, was quoted by Time magazine in a famous 1992 cover story about nutrition as saying that vitamins just gave one "expensive urine." However, four years later, in 1996, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) established regulations requiring the addition of folic acid to enriched breads, flours, cereals, corn meals, pastas, rice, and other grain products. This was in response to the discovery that many thousands of babies were being born with spina bifida because their mothers were not receiving enough folate in their diet. Spina bifida is a potentially fatal neural tube defect that occurs in the first month of pregnancy when the spinal column doesn't entirely close. Since many Americans eat flour products, and don't eat enough leafy green vegetables (that contain folate), this strategy has saved the lives of thousands.
While improving dietary habits can be key to the prevention of disease and promotion of heath, health care professionals and scientistsincreasingly recognize that vitamin supplements also play a very important role. The evidence is now clear that in order to acheive and maintain proper health the numans at least 40 essential micronutrients (vitamins, minerals, and other bionutrients), and that quite often diet alone is inadequate to provide these nutrients. It has been estimated that each year there are 14 million cases of preventable heart disease, 1.3 million preventable cases of cancer, more than 500,000 preventable strokes and thousands of babies born with neural tube defects that could have been prevented by a simple multivitamin.
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