Let’s be real here: when it comes to , eating healthy can sometimes feel like taking a test
you never studied for.
What are all of these in gredient names I’ve never heard of before?
Should I be getting less of this in my diet or more of it?
Well, at the very least, the writers at Bestie are eager to make things a little easier for
you and your meal plan by giving you a crash course on some nutrition facts you might not
have heard about before.
For starters, when’s the last time you heard anyone ask if you were getting enough selenium
in your diet.
If you just thought to yourself “selenium?
What the heck is that?” then you’re in luck, because today we’re going to tell
you all about the mineral known as selenium, and why you probably need more of it.
Before we start, make sure you’re getting your recommended daily intake of new videos
and content by subscribing to Bestie and ringing the notification bell.
Even if this is your first time ever hearing about selenium, this obscure little mineral
is actually a vital component to maintaining a healthy diet.
While you only need to ingest this mineral in relatively small doses, selenium plays
an important role for several of your body’s different functions.
The good news is that selenium can be found in a number of different types of food, meaning
that it’s incredibly easy to seamlessly integrate selenium into a healthy diet.
Foods that are high in selenium include chicken and eggs, as well as various types of seafood
such as sardines, halibut, yellowfin tuna and oysters.
If you ‘re not much of a meat eater, you can also find an abundance of selenium in
plant and fungus-based foods such as shiitake mushrooms, sunflower seeds and, most of all,
Brazil nuts.
In fact, a single 5-gram Brazil nut can contain nearly one hundred and forty percent of your
recommended intake of selenium for a whole day!
It’s also worth mentioning that for plant-based sources, the amount of selenium can vary depending
on the selenium content of the soil the plants were grown in.
As a result, where your food was grown and farmed can have a large effect on the amount
of selenium it actually contains.
Because of the fact that a food’s selenium content can vary so wildly, dieticians such
as Jillian Kubala of Healthline suggest that it’s important to make sure your diet is
equally varied, in order to make sure that you’re getting your daily amount of selenium
from a multitude of different types of food and sources.
So now we know how to integrate selenium into your diet, but we still have to answer another
question: what makes selenium so important in the first place?
Well, the answer is that a healthy selenium intake actually benefits your body in a number
of different ways.
For starters, selenium serves as a powerful antioxidant, which can help to protect your
body’s cells against damage from free radicals.
While free radicals have important health benefits of their own, people with an excess
of free radicals in their system as a result of things such as smoking, alcohol and stress
can end up having an increased risk of certain diseases as a result of the surplus of free
radicals damaging your cells through oxidative stress.
Antioxidants such as selenium can help reduce these risks by keeping the free radicals in
your body at more manageable levels, thus lessening the oxidative stress and cell damage
that these radicals can cause in larger numbers.
By helping to manage your body’s free radicals and reducing the risk of oxidative stress,
selenium also helps to prevent the onset of a number of different diseases and unwelcome
health complications.
In addition to reducing the risk of conditions such as premature ageing, selenium may also
help to reduce the risk of certain cancers, According to nearly 70 different studies consisting
of three hundred and fifty thousand different participants, researchers determined that
high levels of selenium in a person’s bloodstream can potentially protect against certain types
of cancer such as breast, lung, colon and prostate cancers.
In addition, other studies have found that oral selenium supplements might also help
to reduce the side effects in patients currently undergoing radiation therapy as part of their
cancer treatments.
Getting a healthy amount of selenium in your diet may also protect your body against heart
disease and help you to maintain overall heart health.
According to 25 different observational studies, increasing your body’s selenium levels by
50 percent can potentially reduce the risk of coronary artery disease by as much as 24
percent!
Selenium may also lower the markers of inflammation in your body, which is one of the biggest
contributors when it comes to the risk of heart disease.
Selenium can also potentially help prevent the onset of Alzheimer’s disease, which
continues to be a leading cause of death in the United States.
Because neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s are believed to occur in part because of oxidative
stress, a healthy intake of selenium can potentially reduce the risk of the onset and progression
of conditions such as Alzheimer’s.
According to some studies, an increased intake of selenium through both food and supplements
may help improve the memories of Alzheimer’s patients.
Selenium is also an important nutrient when it comes to maintaining the proper functioning
of your body’s thyroid gland, which regulates your body’s metabolism and controls your
body’s growth and development.
According to some studies, a healthy dosage of selenium can help to reduce the risk of
illnesses and conditions such as autoimmune thyroiditis and hypothyroidism.
Finally, selenium also helps to bolster your immune system and may even help reduce the
symptoms associated with asthma.
According to one relevant study, patients with asthma were shown to have improved lung
function when their diets consisted of a healthy intake of selenium.
Of course, as beneficial as selenium can be, it’s important to make sure you don’t
overdo it.
Selenium provides a number of health benefits when consumed in healthy, moderate doses,
too much selenium in your diet can have the opposite effect; according to Healthline,
too high a dose of selenium can even prove to be fatal!
While this condition known as selenium toxicity is rare, it’s important to regulate your
intake of selenium to avoid accidentally getting too much into your system.
The risk of selenium toxicity is much more likely to occur as a result of taking supplements
as opposed to eating foods that contain selenium.
Signs of selenium toxicity include hair loss, dizziness, nausea, vomiting, facial flushing,
tremors and muscle soreness.
In especially severe cases, acute selenium toxicity can potentially lead to even more
serious developments such as intestinal and neurological symptoms, heart attack, kidney
failure, and yes, even death.
In other words, you can always get too much of a good thing, so make sure you don’t
overcommit to adding selenium to your diet.
Trying to manage a healthy diet isn’t always easy, but having an inside edge on important
nutritional facts can make managing your meal plan a little bit simpler.
The good news is that sometimes, some of the most important vitamins and minerals to maintain
a healthy and nutritional lifestyle are more common than we think.
Did you find this video helpful or informative?
Do you think there’s anything important that we might have missed?
Feel free to let us know in the comments section below to help us keep the conversation going!
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might find it interesting.
Thanks for watching!