How To Increase Vitamin Absorption
It takes time, effort, money, and discipline to plan and stick to a healthy, balanced diet. So you want to make sure you’re getting the most nutrition out of every bite, especially the vitamins. Making a few tweaks here and there can help improve your body’s vitamin absorption, which will improve your health and well-being and boost your energy levels and improve your mood.
To help you get as much benefit from the foods that you are eating as possible, here are five tips on how to optimise the absorption of vitamins they contain:
- Choose the correct cooking method
- Take fat-soluble vitamins with oils or fats
- Take the right vitamins together
- Introduce probiotics and prebiotics to your diet
- Try an IV vitamin drip
Choose the correct cooking method
Research has shown that exposure to heat and water can break down vitamins, especially the water-soluble B-complex vitamins and vitamin C. So cooking, mainly fruits and vegetables, destroys some of the vitamins in these foods.
To help keep these vitamins intact in your food, avoid boiling, baking, and other extended, high-temperature cooking methods. Instead, steam or lightly saute your food. If you need to bake or boil your food anyway, we recommended waiting until the water is boiling before adding in the food, covering the pot to reduce cooking times, and cooking vegetables and fruit in large chunks.
Take fat-soluble vitamins with oils or fats
Fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E and K are absorbed along with fats in your diet and stored in the body’s fatty tissue and liver, so you need to add a little fat to your food to take full advantage of these vitamins. Drizzle a bit of cold-pressed virgin olive oil over your salad before you serve and over your veggies and salmon before baking and include in your diet other good sources of fat like almonds and sunflower seeds.
Take the right vitamins together
Vitamins are great on their own, but some of them work better combined. Certain nutrients enhance the absorption of each other, so combining foods in the right way is another great way of maximising their benefits for your health. For example, vitamin C and iron should be taken together since vitamin C helps your body absorb iron. Vitamin A allows vitamin E to be absorbed, and together they form a powerful antioxidant. Vitamin K and vitamin D should be taken together because their combination helps your body absorb calcium better.
Introduce probiotics and prebiotics to your diet
How your body absorbs vitamins, and other nutrients significantly depend on your gut health, so making sure that your gut flora is well balanced is crucial. Although people often think of bacteria and other microorganisms as harmful, many are actually very beneficial to your health. We have billions of such bacteria living in the digestive system that help us digest food and even help fight infections.
Probiotics are living strains of bacteria that add to the population of useful bacteria in your digestive system. Consuming probiotics in supplement form is one way to get them, but you can also get them from fermented foods like live yoghurt, kefir, sauerkraut, and kimchi, among others.
On the other hand, prebiotics are a form of dietary fibre that your body can’t digest, so they go straight to your lower digestive tract, where they act as food for your gut’s healthy bacteria. You’ll find prebiotics in many fruits, vegetables, and whole grains like artichokes, chicory root, garlic, onion, asparagus, barley, oats, and apples.
Try an IV vitamin drip
An intravenous or IV drip delivers essential nutrients and fluids directly into the bloodstream, bypassing your digestive tract. When vitamins are taken orally, they have to be absorbed in the stomach and then transformed into useable forms by the liver. These processes lead to losses and waste of vitamins and nutrients in general, as the absorption rate depends on your gut and liver health, your deficiencies, and how well your hormones are balanced, among other things. By bypassing your digestive system, IV vitamin drip therapy ensures the maximum possible absorption and effectiveness of vitamins entering the body.
How can Effect Doctors help?
As one of London’s leading IV drip clinics, we offer a unique range of intravenous drips, all of which are administered by our team of trained doctors and nurses. We pride ourselves on employing only the highest quality staff members, all of whom are fully qualified with years of experience. We were founded by NHS doctors, who’ve also developed our range of IV drips and treatments. You can find out more about our staff on our Meet the Team page.
Here at Effect Doctors, we don’t just sell ready-made IV bags. Instead, we provide bespoke solutions tailored to your individual needs, requirements, and medical history. Our doctors prescribe them after a full medical consultation.
Each of our IV drips contains a different combination of vitamins, minerals and electrolytes tailored to your specific needs. Our truly isotonic and pH neutral base solution is considerably more advanced than most of our competitors, and we carry over 100 different medications and ingredients in stock.
While we have our state of the art clinic in London (we’re a 5-minute walk from Sloane Square, right off the King’s Road in the heart of Chelsea), we know that a number of our customers would prefer to have their treatment in the comfort of their own home or office. So if you are located in London, a member of our team will come to your home or office for a private session for an additional fee. They will get everything set up for your IV vitamin therapy and be on hand throughout your session. If you’d like to know more about booking an IV drip at home, please contact our team.
