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Diets are a legitimate and often necessary method for losing weight and getting into healthier shape. However diets can and often do have a negative influence on health as well, dieters must be extremely careful to maintain a healthy and balanced diet. Recent research suggest that all too often, dieters are cutting more than just carbs, they’re missing out on vitamins and other nutrients the body needs to stay healthy.

The phenomenon of dieting is widespread, with one in every three adults in the United States apparently making the effort to eat less and lose pounds. Weight loss supplements and various products account for over thirty-billion dollars a year in sales in the United States alone.

Most popular diets focus on cutting back on the overall quantity of food consumed, as well as regulating the particular quantities of things like fat, protein and carbs. Since they aren’t directly relevant to losing weight, vitamins and minerals are often forgotten about despite their critical importance. 

Vitamin deficiencies can be devastating, and will naturally compromise one’s efforts to get healthy as they diet. Serious diseases can result such as osteoporosis, and various other health problems including having a low blood count and even neurological damage.

Various diet programs and methods will provide varying quantities of vitamins, so before you begin a diet program you should consider how you plan on to get enough vitamins into your diet. Studies have shown that Vitamin E is hardest hit by dieting, particularly for women.

The particularly unfortunate part about this is that it really doesn’t need to be this way; diets should be a reason to increase one’s vitamin intake, not compromise it. However some diets do reflect this fact, apparently the Zone diet has been shown to provide its adherents with a vitamin boost, but this is not meant to be a recommendation of that diet; it just serves as evidence that decreasing one’s intake of vitamins need not be an inevitable result of an effective diet.

If you want to begin a healthy, vitamin enriched diet but aren’t sure how, there are certain crucial guidelines to follow. Cutting down on carbs is important, but it certainly isn’t the whole story and you can afford to have a few more carbs than your diet plan suggests if it means you’re taking more vitamins. What is really crucial is staying away from processed foods like white bread, white rice, packaged foods, and anything with refined sugars like pop and candy.