Living a healthy lifestyle comes with plenty of benefits. Regular exercise, a healthy diet, and the right mix of supplements can help you feel younger and protect you from many illnesses. Many healthy habits help you maintain a lifestyle that promotes wellness.
What kind of supplements should you include as part of your daily wellness routine? When considering dietary supplements, you’ll find no shortage of options to help improve just about anything related to your body’s form and function.
Have you considered zinc? It’s a critical element that contributes to your good health. If you aren’t getting enough zinc, it might be time to consider adding a supplement to your daily routines. Check out these eleven impressive facts about zinc!
1. Regulate Your Immune System
You probably know that vitamin C helps boost your immune system. Did you also know that zinc can provide immune benefits, too?
Zinc activates the T lymphocytes (T cells) in your body. These cells are critical to attacking infected cells and regulating immune responses. While Vitamin C boosts your immune system’s capabilities, think of zinc as helping activate it and monitor how it fights infection in your body.
2. Treat a Cold
You can find throat lozenges containing zinc in almost any pharmacy aisle. Because zinc helps activate your immune system, when you feel a cold coming on, start taking zinc lozenges right away. Some people believe that zinc can help shorten the length of your cold.
3. Heal Your Wounds
Whether you deal with recurring wounds, like skin lesions or ulcers, or you have an occasional wound from an injury, zinc can help! The element helps with the structure and integrity of the skin. Adding more zinc to your diet and applying a topical zinc treatment can expedite the healing process for many types of wounds.
Zinc also helps reduce inflammation and the growth of bacteria. Some diaper rash creams also contain zinc to help ease rash symptoms for children.
4. Increase Your Testosterone
If you’re struggling with fertility issues (or just need more pep in your step), zinc can help! If you experience a loss of libido, fatigue, weakness in your muscles, or infertility, you could have a zinc deficiency.
Taking zinc for testosterone can help increase your levels and improve your ability to build muscle. It can also help you have more energy and increase your stamina.
5. Clear Your Acne
Zinc probably can’t completely cure your acne, but it shows promise in reducing the inflammation that contributes to the visibility of pimples and redness from acne. Applying zinc sulfate could help improve the appearance of the skin for acne sufferers!
6. Fight Inflammatory Diseases
Increasing your zinc intake could help fight against inflammatory and chronic diseases that come with age. Eating more foods with higher zinc content could help your body maintain healthy levels of zinc to keep chronic diseases at bay.
An additional zinc supplement can also boost your body’s disease-fighting capabilities!
7. Improve Your Memory
If you struggle to remember things or find it challenging to learn, you could need more zinc in your diet!
Zinc plays a role in how your neurons communicate with each other. Improving how your neurons pass information between other neurons can improve your ability to learn new things and retain information.
8. Treat Your Depression
Depression can be a difficult thing to treat effectively. From therapies to medication, working with doctors and counselors can help regulate how you deal with depression.
When other treatments don’t seem to work, your depression could be a symptom of low zinc levels in your body. Zinc helps modulate the way you deal with stress and how it affects your body. When stress triggers depression, zinc can help counteract that effect.
Be sure you consult your therapist or doctor before adjusting medicines for depression or adding zinc to your treatment plan. The right amount of additional zinc could be the thing that helps ease your severest depression symptoms.
9. Improve Stroke Recovery
Suffering from a stroke can have a severe impact on cognitive function and motor skills. Adding zinc to the treatment program for someone following a stroke can improve their ability to recover more quickly. A doctor can recommend the correct dosage to aid in the rehabilitation of a stroke patient.
10. Reduce the Effects of PMS
Women who experience severe symptoms of Pre-Menstrual Syndrome (PMS) deal with physical pain, as well as emotional difficulties every month. A zinc deficiency can worsen the effects of PMS in some women.
Improving your zinc intake could decrease the severity of the mental, physical, and emotional symptoms of dealing with intense bouts of PMS.
11. Treat Your Diarrhea
Plenty of things can cause diarrhea, from illness to something you ate that doesn’t agree with you. Maybe you need to improve your colon’s general health, but diarrhea can also be the result of a zinc deficiency.
If you experience diarrhea regularly, and over-the-counter medicines don’t seem to help, try adding more foods that are high in zinc content to your diet. When considering a supplement, talk to your doctor about the correct dosage of zinc to add to your daily intake.
Signs of Zinc Deficiency
With colds or other illnesses, adding zinc boosts your immune system for a short time to help your body heal quicker. However, suffering from a long-term zinc deficiency can show itself through a variety of symptoms.
If you experience brittle, bowing, or other issues with your fingernails, hair loss, a swollen tongue, or erectile dysfunction, there’s a chance you’re not getting enough zinc in your diet. Consult a doctor before choosing a zinc supplement to add to your diet. It’s critical to balance the right amount of zinc in your system to overcome a deficiency but not create additional health issues.
These Facts About Zinc Can Help Improve Your Health!
Your body doesn’t need a lot of zinc for optimal performance, but it does require the right amount to keep some of your most critical functions running smoothly. Use these facts about zinc to help improve your health!
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