If I had to give you one piece of advice about supplements it would be to avoid them where you can. While they can be very useful for plugging any gaps that you might have in your diet, they’re not necessary. It’s not actually that difficult to maintain the correct levels of vitamins and minerals with your diet. If it was anywhere near as difficult as the myriad of dietary supplements on the market today insinuates then we’d have died out as a species generations ago. Remember, supplements are recent things and we got along just fine without them. Eat well, eat smart and remember to avoid processed foods wherever you can and you’ll find it relatively easy to get everything you need.
Selenium is a mineral which is found in a lot of foods which are described as ‘earth foods’ as they grow in the ground. A lot of nuts contain selenium and you can get everything you need of this little mineral by eating just two Brazil nuts a day. Regardless of how easy it is to get your daily dose, there are selenium supplements on the market too. This is largely because for a long time it was touted that the mineral was fantastic at protecting from things like heart disease. While it’s true that in the correct quantities selenium will help to maintain your heart, too much creates its own problems.
Just like anything else, an overdose of minerals can be very harmful to you. It was recently shown that people who’d been taking selenium supplements for long periods of time were much more likely to contract Type Two diabetes. This was because they’d managed to keep overly high levels of selenium in their system for protected periods of a time which had raised their insulin resistance. The study that this information was pulled from involved around 20,000 people and as such can be considered fairly, if not entirely, accurate.
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