What Are
Health Supplements?

Health supplements are consumed to augment your normal diet. There are many instances when your normal food intake is not sufficient to meet your nutritional needs. You need to have something additional by way of supplements to provide you with the necessary nutrition.

Body builders, athletes, weight loss dieters, people consuming vegetarian diets, and sick people, etc. use these supplements under the right form. Pregnant women also need supplements, since they have to consume nutrition not just for themselves, but also for the child within their womb.

There are many supplements for consumers to choose from. Some of them are designed to replace your meals completely, some help boost your immune system, others aid in digestion, still others are used to provide specific nutrients for specific purposes. There are health supplements that control appetite or boost metabolism. You can also use these supplements to lose weight.

Nutraceuticals (definition)

There are health supplements that provide you with additional nutrition, apart from the food you eat. Vitamins, body building whey proteins, creatine, minerals etc fall under this category. They fulfill the shortfall between what your body is in need of and what your normal food can supply. You can consider them as additional nutrition. This is why an athlete must have a greater source of sports nutrition than the average person.

These supplements are also used for therapeutic purposes when a person's nutritional needs exceed the amount of nutrition that he/she can get from the daily food. The nutraceuticals industry serves a huge market in the United States.

AntiOxidants

Antioxidants are vitamin supplements that are used to retard the aging process in people. They take care of the dangerous free radicals that roam around in our bodies, creating havoc with the cellular DNA. They also prevent premature aging in people. Beta-carotene, ALA, etc. are some of them. They fight the free radicals that are generated in our bodies during metabolism and other bodily processes.

Weight Loss

Many supplements aid in weight loss. They do it primarily through three methods: setting a control on appetite, boosting metabolism and blocking the absorption of selective undesirable things, such as, fat and excessive carbohydrates.

You can buy these supplements from shops that sell medical supplies. There are also many online merchants, just keep in mind the the price you pay vs the value you get.