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Multivitamins

If you can get the lid off, you probably don't need them When I ask people if they are taking any vitamins, herbs or supplements, many people will say they are taking a multivitamin.  When I ask them why they take it, I get a quizzical look most of the time. I think this is something that resonates from childhood and parental advice of the idea that we need vitamins to help our body develop.  I'm not pediatrician so I can't speak to the effects on the developing child, but I will say that most non-pregnant adults without major medical conditions do not need extra vitamins. You'll be impressed by these labels promising 120%, 300%, 1200% of your daily dose of vitamin whatever it is, but the truth is that for most of these vitamins, if you take more than your daily dose your body needs, the rest just ends up in your urine.  You are literally peeing money away in this case. There's been a new trendy vitamin every decade or so for the last 40-50 years; First it...
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Electrolytes

Y'all Water Tread Lytely or Urine Trouble I think most people kinda understand how your body works with water and salt, but not always enough to make the right choice as to what the body really needs. Your body has a complex way of controlling the concentration of things in your bloodstream.  As concentration is based both on how much of the solute (in this case lets called it sodium or salt) and solvent (water) you have mixed together, there's a lot of ways to mess around with the concentration. You've probably seen some reports of runners who end up very sick from drinking too much water - what happens for them is they lose a lot of salt and water through sweating but if they only drink water to replace it, they end up with a comparatively larger amount of water than salt in their bloodstream and so their sodium concentration can drop to dangerous levels.  The same sort of thing can happen when you get very sick and are only hydrating with water and not salts (like...
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GERD/Heartburn/Acid Reflux

Let's talk a little about heartburn because it is amazingly common. So what's the problem?  Think of your stomach as being like a soda bottle, which would make your stomach acid the soda (which actually has about the same level of acidity).  That bottle is well designed to deal with the soda in it swishing and swashing the same way your stomach lining has evolved to be very thick so it can handle all the acid. Occasionally, or frequently, you open the bottle and drop something in so it can start dissolving and moving in to your small intestine.  That bottle cap is called the lower esophageal sphincter (LES) and it is an involuntary muscle (so you can't control it) that relaxes and contracts to allow food to come in.  But it also is there to keep stomach acid from splashing up into the esophagus BECAUSE the esophagus does not have the same kind of thick walls the stomach does so it is easily damaged. There are a number of ways that the LES can be interfered w...
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