How To Avoid Depleting Your B-Vitamins This Holiday Season

Getting enough B-Vitamins is essential during the winter months where we may feel more tiredness and fatigue than usual. It’s also worth considering that stress levels are at an all time high as the demands of the festive season get into full swing. This can make it more challenging to stay energised and active when our levels of B-vitamins are low. 

Here are some good ways to avoid depleting your B-vitamins during the holiday season…

1. Reduce Stress 

Learning to reduce your stress levels is recommended for best health. Deep breathing exercises can help, as can practising mindfulness techniques and eating a proper diet to ensure you are receiving adequate nutrition. Prolonged stress has been shown to deplete the essential nutrients such as B nutrients and Magnesium that your body needs to create energy. 

2. Limit Alcohol

It’s tempting to drink a lot of alcohol to relax with and celebrate the festive season. As an immunosuppressant, alcohol also has a sedative quality and this can make you feel drowsy or lethargic if drank consistently. 

3. Reduce Your Sugar Intake

This can be difficult as sugar is everywhere during the festivities. It comes in many forms including chocolate, sweets, cakes, along with all carbohydrates such as breads, pastries, potatoes, cereals and more. While it may be tasty, try to minimise your intake where possible as sugar is highly inflammatory in the body once consumed. 

Reducing your sugar intake is recommended as eating sugar causes blood sugar spikes and lows that can lead to fatigue and confusion. It’s also advisable to reduce your sugar intake overall, as research suggests that this can help to stop weight gain and fat buildup that’s linked with heart disease. 

4. Get Enough Sleep

In all of the excitement of celebrating with friends and family, it’s easy to stay up late partying and putting sleep on the backburner. Yet getting enough sleep is the best thing you can do to enhance your body’s ability to make ATP – the body’s energy molecule. Getting enough sleep also helps us to reduce our caloric needs by spending part of our time functioning at a lower metabolism. This is supported by the way in which the metabolic rate drops during sleep. Sleep is also essential for humans because research suggests that 8 hours of sleep can produce 35 percent of energy savings, when compared to being in a state of wakefulness.

5. Be Careful with Caffeine

Drinking a lot of coffee may help you to stay awake but it can also block adenosine levels. Adenosine is a chemical in the central nervous system that regulates your sleep-wake cycle. When adenosine levels increase it eventually makes you drowsy by suppressing the activity of cells in the basal forebrain. When you fall asleep, these adenosine levels drop. 

Caffeine can block the brain’s adenosine receptors but it doesn’t stop their actual production. This means when caffeine’s effects wear off, there’s a buildup of adenosine wanting to bind to its receptors – and this leads to tiredness. 

To minimise these effects, it’s recommended to moderate your caffeine intake to 400 milligrams per day. This is about two to four 8-ounce cups of brewed coffee per day, depending on the mixture. You could also try drinking herbal tea or water as alternatives to coffee if you need to feel refreshed.

How To Ensure You’re Getting enough B-Vitamins

All of these lifestyle factors can deplete your B-Vitamin levels if you’re not careful. That’s why it’s essential to ensure you are getting enough B-Vitamins both from healthy food but also taking a nutritional supplement to boost your overall levels. However, it’s not always possible to get enough from food sources alone.

B-Vitamins play a vital role in maintaining your good health and wellbeing, along with having a direct impact on your energy levels, brain function and cell metabolism.

Taking a B Complex supplement can treat or prevent vitamin deficiency caused by a poor diet. For best results, a sublingual B vitamin supplement is recommended.

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