Taking care of the health of your teenage children is as important as for adults. Supplementing your young children with a good multivitamin along with a healthy diet is one of the best things you can do. Vitamins and minerals are essential for physical and mental growth, and unfortunately, we cannot get enough nutrients through diet only. This is why multivitamins are important to fulfill the required quantity of essential nutrients.
What are the important nutrients for teens?
There are 13 essential vitamins and 14 minerals that are required by a teenager to grow properly and efficiently. These healthy nutrients include:
Vitamin A is important for the health of the eyes and essential for repairing damaged tissues.
Vitamin Bs: important for boosting metabolism and producing energy.
Vitamin C: is important for fighting infections, reducing cold duration, and skin health.
Vitamin D: essential for the health of the heart, brain, and bones
Calcium: Essential for the strengthening of bones and teeth. The recommended quantity of calcium for teenagers is 1000mg per day.
Folic acid: Essential for cell division.
Iron: essential for the production of red blood cells and stimulation of muscle growth. Iron is known good for recovering the deficiency of the blood caused by the menstrual cycle in teenage girls.
If you consider the best vitamins for teens, you need to keep in mind that not all multivitamins are created equally. All supplements vary significantly in quality making it important to choose wisely for teenage kids. When choosing multivitamin supplements for teenagers, you need to understand the potentiality and bioavailability of particular vitamin. For example, vitamin A in one product may not be as potent as that vitamin in the second product.
How do find the right multivitamin for teenagers?
While finding the right multivitamins for your teenage kids, it is important to calculate the scores.
Composition of vitamins
When choosing multivitamins supplements for your teenage kids, it is important to check the number of essential vitamins and minerals in the product. There is a number of products that have missing key ingredients, such as iodine, phosphorus, and magnesium. There are a few other ingredients that are important for the health of teenagers but are lesser-known. These nutrients include inositol, choline, and lycopene. Therefore, it is important to consider all these ingredients while buying a product. These all nutrients have a number of health benefits and are not typically included in many multivitamin formulations. So, make sure to give such products extra importance that contains a variety of important ingredients.
Safety of the product
Safety comes first when it comes to buying a good multivitamin for your young children. The safety of the product should be considered first even if the product is less potent. The quantity of the nutrients is not more important than the safety. So, make sure to look for safety first. The safety of the product is measured by keeping the RDA standards in mind.
Bioavailability of certain nutrient
The bioavailability of the active ingredient in a product is the capability of the ingredient to be absorbed. The absorption of the ingredient is important, so it can become available for use by the cells and other body organs. While choosing the supplement, keep in mind that the given nutrient can come in different chemical forms, and some of these forms may be more bioavailable than others. For example, the form of calcium known as calcium citrate is more bioavailable than the other forms of calcium.
The potency of the supplement
While looking for the potency of the supplement you are choosing for teens, you need to keep in mind that the potency of the product has two components. One is the chemical form of the nutrient and the second is the amount of nutrient in one serving. After considering the chemical form of the nutrient in the product, you can find how potent the product is. For example, magnesium oxide is more potent than magnesium citrate. So, the product that contains magnesium oxide is more potent than the product containing magnesium in the form of magnesium citrate.
Effectiveness of the product
When choosing multivitamin supplements for teens, it is important to keep in mind how effective the product is. To calculate the overall effectiveness of the supplement, look for the composition of the nutrients, the potency of each nutrient, the safety of the nutrients used, and finally, the bioavailability of the nutrient. After looking at all these factors, you will be able to find the effectiveness of the product you are interested in. always prefer buying the product that has an overall effectiveness of 8 or more.
Conclusion
Vitamins and minerals are essential for the growth of the body and the proper functioning of organs. However, teens have more nutritional needs because of growing age and developing bodies. The most important vitamins are A, B, C, D, E, and K along with the minerals such as calcium, iron, zinc, and magnesium. Make sure to find the right product for your teens.
