Last November, I wrote about gummy vitamins and how they are now marketed to adults. I’ve found myself dipping into my daughter’s stash of gummy vitamins, so it wouldn’t be a bad idea to pick up some for myself.

At the time of my previous post, I couldn’t recall the name for the gummy vitamins for adults that I saw in a commercial. Well, I’ve found them. Supplement company One-A-Day has combined gummy candies with vitamins in their new VitaCraves Adult Multivitamins. Vitacraves are available in fruit and sour fruit flavors for about $9.

The vitamin guide has covered a variety of essential vitamins our bodies need and to conclude the series we’ll be ending with zinc, which is actually a mineral, but worth covering for its importance in body function as well.

Zinc is essential for growth and development throughout all of our life stages. It supports our immune system and is involved in the healing of our wounds along with helping to form proteins. If you don’t get enough zinc in your diet you could see the deficiency through hair loss, diminished appetite, slowed growth rate, diarrhea, and delayed wound healing.

As we move into the new year with many focuses shifting to dieting and calorie counting, I wanted to make sure that you take the time to focus on one very important, often overlooked, area.

Vitamin L is probably not a vitamin you have heard of before. The reason for this is vitamin L is not a vitamin you can get through eating the right foods or from taking capsules. You can’t get vitamin L from the sun’s beautiful rays. Vitamin L stands for “love” and is equally important in our health and well being as the vitamins our bodies need to function.

Vitamin E is a fat-soluble vitamin that is an antioxidant and protects our body from free radicals. These free radicals can damage our cells and also cause cardiovascular disease, which is why it can be said that vitamin E is essential to maintaining a healthy heart and protecting against heart disease. As an additional benefit vitamin E is also effective in helping with the immune system.

Vitamin E is typically measured in milligrams and the recommended daily intakes are as follows:

• Men 19+ years of age = 15mg/daily
• Women 19+ years of age=15mg/daily
• Women who are breastfeeding= 19mg/daily
  

Want to keep your teeth and bones strong? Then you want to pay extra attention to vitamin D and ensure to have it in your daily diet. Vitamin D has also been shown to lower our risk for cancer, upwards of 150,000 cases according to Cedric Garland, a doctor of public health. One of the best ways to get vitamin D is directly from sunlight; this is due to how our bodies produce the vitamin from the exposure to ultraviolet radiation.

With the increase in concern for skin cancers and wanting to protect our skin from sun damage and burning, the amount of sunscreen we utilize has caused our vitamin D levels to plummet. I myself am very fair skinned, but I still make sure to allow my skin time outdoors to soak up the sun’s beautiful rays in limited quantities, ensuring not to burn or over expose myself.