Did you take yours today?™ by Vitamins On Demand

From NutraIngredients:

Combining probiotics with perinatal dietary counselling could help reduce the risk of diabetes in mothers and provide a “safe and cost-effective” tool in addressing obesity in children, according to a new study from Finland.
Published in the British Journal of Nutrition, the study found that probiotic-supplemented dietary counselling could help reduce the risk of diabetes during pregnancy, improve blood glucose control and improve child health.

Full Article

From CNN:

The multibillion-dollar market for dietary supplements is filled with products that claim to boost mood or improve depression. Some products are even billed as an alternative to prescription antidepressants.
Don’t believe everything you read on a label. Often the claims made by supplement manufacturers aren’t backed up by solid scientific evidence, and the potency and contents of supplements can vary widely. (Some are anything but “natural.”) Serious depression generally requires professional help, whether or not that includes antidepressant medication.
That said, some supplements — such as St. John’s wort and SAMe (pronounced “sammy”) — have been tested fairly extensively and may improve your symptoms if you experience mild depression or related conditions such as seasonal affective disorder. Full Article Here

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From nhiondemand.com:

Source: Psychopharmacology
There are a number of ways to deal with stress. One is to realize that stress places additional demands on the body in terms of energy and nutrition. Therefore, providing the body with additional nutrients such as B-vitamins and antioxidants during times of acute stress or long-term chronic stress can support the body’s ability to handle stress.
Fatigue is synonymous with lethargy, tiredness, lassitude, being run down, or lack of energy. It has no standard definition shared by the lay public and the medical establishment; so many patients use it to denote related conditions such as simply a need for sleep. Fatigue may be related to an underlying medical condition, poor nutrition, stress, or it may exist independently.
A multivitamin is a preparation intended to supplement a human diet with vitamins, dietary minerals and other nutritional elements. A multivitamin/mineral supplement is defined in the United States as a supplement containing 3 or more vitamins and minerals but does not include herbs, hormones, or drugs, with each nutrient at a dose determined by the Food and Drug Administration and the maximum daily intake that will not cause a risk for adverse health effects. People with dietary imbalances may include those on restrictive diets and those who cannot or will not eat a nutritious diet.Pregnant women and elderly adults have different nutritional needs than other adults, and their physicians may indicate it would be beneficial for them to take a multivitamin.
The effects of multivitamins are usually only studied in elderly people. A recent study assessed the relationship between multivitamin supplementation and psychological functioning in healthy, non-elderly adults. Included in the study were 215 men aged 30 to 55 years who were employed full-time. The men received either a proprietary multivitamin or a placebo for 33 days. Both groups were tested at the beginning of the study and at the end with a battery of mood, stress and health questionnaires and with physical and mental tasks that included mental arithmetic. The results revealed that after 33 days the group who received the multivitamin reported significantly improved ratings of general mental health, reduced subjective stress and increased ratings of ‘vigour’, with a strong trend towards an overall improvement in mood. The supplementation group also performed better on the cognitive function tests. The placebo group did not report significant changes in any area that was tested. These results seem to suggest that multivitamin supplementation may improve ratings of stress, mental health and cognitive performance in adults who are otherwise healthy.1

1 Kennedy DO, Veasey R, Watson A, et al. Effects of high-dose B vitamin complex with vitamin C and minerals on subjective mood and performance in healthy males. Psychopharmacology. May2010.

Tampa, FL – Vitamins On Demand has updated our Men’s, Women’s, Men’s 50+ and Women’s 50+ so that the base vitamin packs are now all softgels. As you know, we’ve been extolling the virtues of softgels for some time now so it’s only fitting that we’ve replaced the Vitamin D3 capsule with a new Vitamin D3 softgel. What’s even better is that we are doing this without raising our prices. Check out our new 100% softgel packs. Each includes softgel Multivitamin, softgel Omega-3 and softgel Vitamin D3.

(Health.com) — People who take vitamin E supplements regularly for years — whether they are smokers or nonsmokers — may lower their risk of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, the lung condition that is the fourth leading cause of death in the United States. Full Article

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WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – High humidity present in bathrooms and kitchens could be degrading the vitamins and health supplements stored in those rooms, even if the lids are on tight, a Purdue University study shows.

Lisa Mauer, an associate professor of food science, said that crystalline substances – including vitamin C, some vitamin B forms and other dietary supplements – are prone to a process called deliquescence, in which humidity causes a water-soluble solid to dissolve. Keeping those supplements away from warm, humid environments can help ensure their effectiveness.

“You might see salt or sugar start to cake in the summer, start to form clumps, and that’s a sign of deliquescence,” said Mauer, whose findings were published in the early online version of the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. “You can also get chemical instabilities, which are a little more problematic if you’re consuming a dietary supplement with vitamin C for that vitamin C content.”

Kitchen salt, sugar and powdered drink mixes commonly cake, Mauer said, making their measurement more difficult but not rendering them useless. Chemical changes become more than a nuisance in vitamins and dietary supplements, however.

“If you get some moisture present or ingredients dissolve, they’ll decrease the quality and shelf life of the product and decrease the nutrient delivery,” Mauer said. “You can get complete loss of the ingredients. It depends on the conditions. It depends on the formulations. Within a very short time – in a week – you can get complete loss of vitamin C in some products that have deliquesced.”

Bathrooms and kitchens can increase the detrimental effects because of spikes in humidity in those rooms. And Mauer said storing vitamins or supplements in containers with lids doesn’t always help.

“Opening and closing a package will change the atmosphere in it. If you open and close a package in a bathroom, you add a little bit of humidity and moisture each time,” Mauer said. “The humidity in your kitchen or bathroom can cycle up quite high, depending on how long of a shower you take, for example, and can get higher than 98 percent.”

Mauer used a gravimetric moisture sorption balance to determine the humidities at which substances would deliquesce. The samples spiked in weight at the deliquescence point because moisture was being adsorbed, meaning humidity was condensing on the solid and then the solid dissolved.

Different crystalline substances deliquesce at different humidities, Mauer said. For example, at room temperature, sodium ascorbate would deliquesce at 86 percent humidity, ascorbic acid at 98 percent humidity and fructose at 62 percent. Some ingredient blends deliquesce in as low as 30 percent humidity. Different forms of ingredients, such as the two forms of vitamin C studied (ascorbic acid and sodium ascorbate), have different deliquescence points, different sensitivity to moisture and different degradation rates. At high enough humidities, samples dissolved completely.

Once humidity or temperature is brought back down, the product will solidify, Mauer said, but the damage has been done.

“Any chemical changes or degradation that have occurred before resolidification don’t reverse. You don’t regain a vitamin C content after the product resolidifies or is moved to a lower humidity,” she said. “The chemical changes we’ve observed are not reversible.”

This information could be important to anyone using vitamin-containing products, ranging from the consumer to the food and dietary supplement industry and ingredient suppliers. Storing products in dry conditions, below their deliquescence relative humidities, can avoid unwanted ingredient loss.

Consumers could notice liquid in vitamin containers, but Mauer said another sign of nutrient degradation is brown spots, especially on children’s vitamins. Mauer suggested discarding any dietary supplement that is showing signs of moisture uptake or browning.

“They’re not necessarily unsafe, but why give a vitamin to a kid if it doesn’t have the vitamin content you’re hoping to give them?” Mauer said. “You’re just giving them candy at that point with a high sugar content.”

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The U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Lilly Endowment Inc. funded the research.

From Men’s Health magazine March 2010:

Chili peppers may soon be the hottest heart-attack treatment. When University of Cincinnati researchers applied capsaicin (the chemical that gives chili peppers their heat) to the skin of mice, they found that it reduced the cardiac damage the mice suffered during a heart attack by 85 percent. It may be that capsaicin stimulated the rodents’ nervous systems, which in turn activated protective cardiac-muscle cells.

Vitamins On Demand offers capsaicin by itself to be added to your pack or as part of our Heart Health Extras.