Vitamins for Teens: Establishing Healthy Habits Early

A lot of what we do here at USANA revolves around helping you develop the right habits to create and maintain a healthy lifestyle. If you go through our blog catalog, you’ll see that’s not really a secret. (If it were, we’d be really bad at secrets.) We talk about developing good, healthy habits a lot. In fact, we have a whole subsection of What’s Up, USANA? dedicated to it.

Our obsession for helping you develop healthy lifestyle habits is kind of like yours for helping your teen (or teens) develop their own. And that starts with making sure they get all the nutrients they need to be at their mental and physical best.

Teen Nutritional Needs

Only three of the essential vitamins we need—vitamins D and K and biotin can be produced within the body (in varying amounts). This means you should be getting the vast majority of the essential elements—vitamins and minerals—that make up your nutritional requirements through diet. While this is true regardless of age, teens are at particular risk of dietary shortfalls.

As a group, teens are more likely to skip breakfast, consume much of their food outside the home, and have sodas, snack foods, and fast foods instead of low-fat milk, fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and lean protein sources than at any other age.

This is where vitamins for teens come in. A vitamin tuned specifically for the needs of teenagers can help pick up the slack when their diet falls short. Specifically, vitamins can help make up the nutritional difference in teens who:

• Are picky eaters
• Have a selective diet, such as veganism or vegetarianism
• Have a poor appetite or erratic eating habits
•  Are experiencing periods of rapid growth
• Are very physically active

Does your teen fall into any of these categories?

Choosing Vitamins for Teens

A couple things to consider when choosing vitamins for your teen is not all vitamins are created equal, and not all vitamins are right for every situation. Although teenagers can use a regular multivitamin—starting at about age 12— they do have slightly different nutrient needs than adults.

When looking for a vitamin, check the daily percent values to ensure your teen will get a broad range of beneficial nutrients. And you’ll want to look for a quality guarantee or Good Manufacturing Practices certification to make sure all the ingredients listed on the bottle are actually in the product and the product is free from harmful contaminants.

Lucky for you (and your teen), we have you covered. USANA’s Body Rox™ is specifically formulated to help fill the gaps in a poor diet and help meet nutritional needs of growing teens. It is a convenient way to help your teens obtain the optimal amounts of micronutrients they need to perform at their mental and physical best every day.*

For more information about Body Rox, visit Ask the Scientists.

Set an Example of Healthy Habits

Now the question is how to get your teen to establish healthy dietary habits that will last a lifetime. There’s no one answer, but studies show that parents who encourage healthy behaviors are more likely to have children who develop good eating habits, are more active, and are healthier overall.

One way to help teens develop great eating habits is by cooking as a family. Teaching teens good cooking skills develops healthier eaters. And cooking and eating with your kids also helps you set an example for healthy eating that kids can mimic (sensible portions, good choices, and more).

By assessing your own diet, supplementation, and lifestyle, this can help your teen do likewise and put them on the path toward establishing lasting, beneficial habits.