Last week I wrote about choosing the right multivitamin and the importance of making sure it’s part of your daily nutritional arsenal.  This week, I’ll begin breaking down each one of the 13 essential vitamins that help make up a multivitamin.  In this post, we’ll discuss Vitamin A, or otherwise referred to as retinol.

Vitamin A is a vitamin that has antioxidant properties and is crucial to your vision, most noticeably recognized for a person’s ability to see clearly at night.  Another factor is eye sight adjustment.  For instance, when you’re outside in the sunlight and you come inside your eyes are forced to make adjustments so you can continue to see clearly; vitamin A has a large role in this function.  Vitamin A also helps in keeping your eyes, skin and mucous membranes moist which makes this vitamin a powerhouse for the body to be able to properly regulate these key functions.  The antioxidant properties I referred to vitamin A having helps the body deal with free radicals which can cause tissue and cell damage.

I’m sure everyone has heard of vitamin A and beta-carotene but I’m not sure everyone understands how they work together.  Most of the vitamin A people get in their foods come from animal-based food but it can also come in from plant-based food (darkly colored vegetables.)  In plant based foods this is through a carotenoid called beta-carotene, which the body then converts into vitamin A.

Vitamin A:

Animal-Based Foods

• Fish
• Milk
• Cheese
• Liver
• Egg Yolks

Plant-Based Foods

• Spinach
• Papaya
• Carrots
• Sweet Potatoes
• Broccoli
• Cantaloupe

To further rave about the benefits of vitamin A… it also helps in the health of bones, teeth, the immune system and is crucial for pregnant women for proper embryonic development.  As you can see, vitamin A is a powerful vitamin and it’s important to understand the complexity a single vitamin can have on your health, both positive and negative.  I encourage you to continue reading about vitamin A because in a blog post; I can just begin to touch on the subject.  If you’re a smoker, someone who is prone to lung cancer and heart disease, you might be able to learn how the addition of this essential vitamin to your diet could tremendously help your health.

Recommended Additional Reading:

Vitamin A (retinol) from the MayoClinic.com

Vitamin A and Carotene Q &A from Ask the Dietitian

Vitamin A Toxicity from eMedicine