With the onset of autumn, most of us are transitioning from a relaxed summer state to a more frenetic fall mode. Whether it’s school starting up again, football season, or a line-up of holiday festivities, our schedules seem to be filling up with events that both excite us and leave our heads spinning.
While many people have developed simple strategies to cope with the craziness, few would guess that nutrition plays a vital role in how well we handle the increased stress load.
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Taking a closer look, it becomes clear that the entire B vitamin complex is used to support emotional health. We need a supply of B vitamins to deal physiologically with emotional stress, using up our body’s supply of it faster. And, whenever we are deficient in B vitamins, we experience emotional stress more intensely.
So, when life speeds up, we end up deficient in B vitamins at the time when we most need them.
Not to mention, a diet saturated with alcohol and sugar – think party punches, Halloween candy, and Thanksgiving pies – works to drain your levels of B vitamins, all on its own (without waiting for stress to do the job).
No wonder so many people find themselves at an all-time emotional low during the holidays! The B vitamins so essential to the body’s coping mechanisms are being drained in every which way.
But don’t start looking for exactly which part of the B-vitamin complex you need to strengthen you emotional health. The truth is, you need the entire complex. Not just B12 or just B6. The entire thing.
Here’s why:
- Each part of the B-vitamin complex has unique and necessary responsibilities. As taken from our above infographic, folate helps with depression and fatigue, vitamin B1 reduces anxiety and stabilizes mood, and vitamin B3 aids in serotonin production – all parts of the complex are important for your emotional health.
- When you isolate parts of a vitamin complex and only take those, you face dangerous side effects. For example, if you take a vitamin B12 supplement – instead of a whole-food form of the B-vitamin complex – you may experience side effects ranging from headaches and swelling to congestive heart failure.
- Each component in the vitamin B complex relies on the other nutrients found with it, in its original food source, to work effectively. So, if you remove vitamin B12 from, say, a steak, and ingest it all by itself, the B12 won’t have any of the other nutrients from the steak that it actually needs to work properly. Therefore, the body will take the nutrients the vitamin B12 needs from other bodily systems, leaving you with other deficiencies.
BFood, the Whole Food form of the entire vitamin B complex, provides our 
emotional health with the stable foundation we need to handle stress. Taken all-year long by those who pride themselves on their abilities to take on the world, BFood is a natural, safe, and effective means of supporting our emotional health when life picks up the pace.