MADRID, 9 Sep. (EUROPA PRESS) –
With the return to school, to the routine, and with the arrival of autumn, unfortunately there are many laboratories and commercial houses that this September ‘sell’ us the need to take vitamin supplements or other supplements to start with more strength the new course. Something that is not necessary at all, unless a doctor prescribes it to us.
This is how Ascensión Marcos, research professor at the CSIC and founder of the Immunonutrition Group at the Institute of Food and Nutrition Science and Technology (ICTAN) of the CSIC, explains it to Infosalus: “With a good diet and good daily physical activity, “which is very important, is enough. There is no need to take vitamin supplements.”
This activity or daily physical exercise must consist of at least 45 minutes, and must be carried out two or three days a week. “It is essential for our immune system to function well. Do we sometimes need probiotics? Yes, sometimes they are interesting, but they must always be advised by a professional. Not just any one is worth it, because many times there are no studies behind it,” he adds. the expert.
Thus, he insists on the convenience or not of taking supplements at this time and emphasizes that this must always have a prior analysis requested by a specialist doctor. “If you have a deficit then yes, you will have to take supplements. But in no case should they be taken lightly. Taking something just for the sake of it doesn’t make sense. You make the body work harder and you have to be careful because it can be worse than good on occasion,” highlights this CSIC researcher.
What’s more, it defends that maintaining a balanced diet that provides all the macronutrients (carbohydrates, fats, and proteins), micronutrients, as well as other bioactive compounds and hydration, plays in favor of the good state of the immune system.
“Good habits, not only diet and eating behavior, but also physical activity, sleep, and rest, or emotional care, participate in the regulation of physiological systems, including immune function; consequently affecting global health,” he emphasizes.
In his opinion, this shows that our country suffers from “good nutritional education”, which he explains precisely in the book ‘Immunonutrition’ (CSIC-Catarata), which he recently published together with Esther Nova Rebato, Sonia Gómez Martínez, and Ligia Esperanza. Díaz Prieto; scientists, all of them from ICTAN.
Here remember that food and nutrition are not the same, and that malnutrition can often be the result of diseases, as demonstrated by numerous scientific publications: “Food is lip service. You feed yourself voluntarily and choose foods to feed yourself. “While nutrition is an involuntary process, from mouth to mouth, and part of physiology and biochemistry. They are different. While it is true that food influences our nutrition, but they are two different things.”
At this point, he emphasizes that our diet can help prevent pathologies, from infectious to other non-communicable ones such as type 2 diabetes, obesity, or neurodegenerative, cardiovascular, or autoimmune diseases.
It is therefore essential to know our nutritional status, Marcos tells Infosalus, which not only consists of a good diet, because depending on our nutritional situation we may or may not have a problem. “To know how our nutritional situation is, we must do a good study of eating behavior, diet, including what physical activity we do, hours of sleep, and if this is of good quality, in addition to quantifying day-to-day stress. It is Emotional management is also very important,” he points out.
In this context, the CSIC researcher emphasizes that the nutritional status of Spaniards is “quite bad”, as in her opinion the pandemic has shown, where relatively young people, according to her account, became overweight and obese, which They had led to very important non-communicable diseases, cardiovascular diseases and even neurodegenerative diseases because there was no good diet or good nutritional status.
“If we do not have a good nutritional status, our immune system does not function properly and therefore infections are more prevalent, as well as all inflammation processes. So we must be very careful,” highlights the founder of the Immunonutrition Group at the CSIC Institute of Food and Nutrition Science and Technology.
