How Vitamin B12 Benefits Your Entire Body!
Getting the proper amount of B vitamins is
essential to your overall health, and vitamin B12 is one that benefits
your whole body. Below you’ll find 8 ways in which this essential
vitamin benefits your body.
1. Improved Heart Health
Vitamin B12’s role in promoting heart
health often gets overlooked, but it’s essential. Vitamin B12, B6, and
folic acid work together to help reduce homocysteine, which is a protein
that can build up in the blood and damage arterial walls. Thus playing a
role in heart disease.
2. Healthy Nervous System
Vitamin B12 benefits your nervous system directly and helps to keep it
in tip-top shape. When this vitamin is in short supply, you might
develop annoying pins and needles in your extremities and/or numbness in
your hands, legs, or feet.
Vitamin B12 helps to produce the fatty sheath that surrounds and
protects your nerves. When you are deficient in it, your nerve cells
cannot function properly.
3. Your Ability to Walk and Move
Tingling and numbness might be one of the first signs of B12-related
nerve damage, but if it continues unaddressed, it can alter the way that
you move. This can sometimes affect your balance, making you more
likely to fall over.
4. Your Oral Health
There are many signs that your tongue can reveal about your health, and a
B12 deficiency is one of them. A mild deficiency can trigger tongue
inflammation. This painful condition can affect how you speak and eat.
Your tongue may be red and swollen or look smooth since the tiny bumps
that contain your taste buds stretch out and disappear.
5. Your Eyesight
Another vital function vitamin B12 benefits is our vision, and a
deficiency is typically related to nervous system damage that affects
the optic nerve. The best defense is a good offense. Vitamin B12 can be
found in animal foods such as meat, poultry, fish, and dairy products.
If you don’t eat animal foods, you can get vitamin B12 from fortified
foods or a supplement.
6. Your Memory
Some research has suggested that a vitamin B12 deficiency is linked to
dementia and memory issues, but it’s not clear whether supplements might
help. The potential link might be a result of high levels of
homocysteine in the blood, but it’s too early to draw any firm
conclusions.
7. Your Gut Health
Everyone knows that eating enough fiber and drinking enough water are
vital to healthy bowel movements, but a vitamin B12 deficiency can also
cause constipation, diarrhea, loss of appetite, and weight loss. The
exact mechanism through which a B12 deficiency causes GI issues is still
unknown.
8. Your Glow
People with a vitamin B12 deficiency often look pale or have slightly
yellow skin. Glitches in your body’s red blood cell production affect
the size and strength of these cells. They might be too big to travel
through your body, resulting in pale skin. If they’re too fragile, they
might break down and cause an excess of bilirubin, which results in an
orange-yellow skin tone.