Theoretically, you could get adequate protein from a strictly vegetarian diet, but practically it would be extremely difficult. For one thing, it would require the eating of huge amounts of food. Most vegetarian diets make excellent use of eggs, milk, and cheese, and to that extent are only partly vegetarian.

Animal proteins are stressed in your reducing diet for another reason. Recent knowledge indicates that Vitamin A is not always well absorbed in the form in which it occurs in green plants. Such plants, normally rated as excellent sources of the vitamin, contain it in yellow pigments of which the chief is carotene.

This does not become the vitamin until it is altered in your liver. It has been found that some persons absorb as little as 5% of available carotene; hence, though their food contains plenty of Vitamin A units, they derive no benefit from it.
Animal foods, however—eggs, butter, liver, milk, cheese —contain the true vitamin. The animal has done all the work of converting the carotene into Vitamin A, saving you the trouble. Read the rest of this entry »

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I remember a few years ago as my wife was pregnant with our first child she qot the requisite baby viatmins ande we never questioned them again. Everyone we knew that was pregnant would take the popular vitamins so that they would get all the nutrients they could while trying not to truly be “eating for two”.

Times have noty changed and Health Canada today announced that pregnant women should take an even larger supplementation of Vitamin D to protect against any possible deficiency and then some.

Women who are pregnant or breast-feeding should consider increasing their vitamin D intake to 2,000 international units a day to reduce the chances their children will develop such ailments as multiple sclerosis, diabetes and cancer later in life, the Canadian Pediatric Society says.

That amount of vitamin D is 10 times higher than what is currently recommended by Health Canada for women in their childbearing years, and the advice is believed to be the first time a medical group has called for healthy people to take such elevated amounts of the sunshine vitamin.

But it is the second time in recent months that a major Canadian public health advocacy group has decided the evidence for taking vitamin D has become so compelling that it is overstepping the government’s recommendations.

The pediatric society, representing doctors who specialize in children’s health, is issuing the vitamin D advice in a position statement being released today in its journal, Pediatrics & Child Health. The statement said aboriginal people in particular are at higher risk of deficiencies of the vitamin.

“New findings suggest that adequate vitamin D status in mothers during pregnancy and in their infants may have lifetime implications,” the statement said.

As a precaution against being exposed to too much of the nutrient, the statement also recommended that women periodically have their doctors monitor their blood levels of the vitamin.