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Dr. Low Dog discusses how a woman can determine if she needs to take dietary supplements.
Dr. Low Dog:
I think that a woman wouldn’t really know if she needs dietary supplements. It would matter sort of if she thinks there’s a particular reason she would take one because dietary supplements are broad, that’s such a huge category. I think most women should take a multivitamin. I think it’s a way to make sure that we are covering any gaps that may occur in our nutrition and, you know, we need adequate calcium and vitamin D for our bones. We need folic acid for reproduction, to make sure we protect our babies. We also need it for our heart and you need folate for mood.
10-30% of patients with depression have low folate levels and also, we know if you give somebody an antidepressant and they have low folate that you are not going to get a very good treatment response, so, you know, and you need vitamin Es and antioxidants and I mean so there’s this whole variety of things that you need in a multivitamin that you may not be getting adequately in your diet.
So I would say most women need a multivitamin, and then I think it really comes down to looking at her individual, her diet, her own medical needs, what her constitution is, her likelihood of getting a particular condition, and then she needs to gauge the responsible use of dietary supplements based on that.
About Dr. Tieraona Low Dog, M.D.:
Dr. Tieraona Low Dog’s extensive career in studying natural medicine began more than twenty-five years ago. She studied midwifery, massage therapy, and was a highly respected herbalist, serving as President of the American Herbalist Guild and running a teaching clinic in Albuquerque, New Mexico before receive her Doctor of Medicine degree from the University of New Mexico School of Medicine. She currently serves as the Director of the Fellowship at the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine.
Visit Dr. Low Dog at her Web site