The Many Unknown Benefits Of Kelp

For those of you who take vitamins, you're probably familiar with the common vitamins contained in your standard "take one for the day and you're done" pill. You may even be familiar with some of the minerals as well. But very few people are aware of, or even know, that your better variety of vitamin comes with a mostly disrespected mineral by the name of kelp. Oh, if only people knew how important kelp is to our daily lives. Yes, this mostly misunderstood mineral, is more important to our bodies than the average person knows.

But why? What's in it? After all, isn't kelp just some sea weed? Well, kelp is a lot more than that. But the reasons that kelp is so beneficial to us comes down to two elements that are found in kelp.

The first is iodine. Yeah, that same iodine that mom used to put on your cuts when you were a kid. That same iodine that burned like the devil. But guess what? It healed your cut pretty quick, didn't it? Well, kelp has a great deal of iodine in it. And no, you don't have to bust open your vitamin pill and spread the contents all over that nasty scratch you got in the backyard while weeding. Iodine works wonders from inside your body as well.

Without getting too technical, iodine is important for thyroid hormone, which absorbs iodide ions from your blood to make and release hormones back into the blood. Why is this important? Because without these iodide ions, thyroid hormone deficiency can reduce your metabolic rate as much as 50%. In English, what this means is that your metabolism slows down considerably, which is a major contributor to obesity. Now do you see why iodine is so important in your diet?

But iodine isn't the only reason that kelp is so important for us. Aside from iodine, kelp also contains alkali. The benefits of alkali may not be as readily recognizable as iodine as nobody ever rubbed alkali on our cuts and scrapes. But alkali does play an important part in our diet and our bodies chemistry.

Our bodies must maintain a proper pH balance in order to function properly. What usually happens when we become ill is that our bodies become acidic. That's when we start to suffer from things like acid indigestion because our bodies have too much acid and not enough alkaline. Yes, alkali is what brings our bodies back into balance when they get too acidic. By taking a regular dose of kelp daily, you're basically keeping your body's pH in balance.

When I was very young, my mother used to buy actual kelp tablets from the health food store. They were really ugly looking and didn't go down all that easy. But guess what? I never had indigestion as a kid, regardless of what I ate. And trust me, I ate some nasty things.

Kelp may be misunderstood, but a daily dose of it can be just the ticket to get your body pH back in balance and maybe even lose a few pounds if you're overweight.

The many unknown benefits of kelp. At least now, they're known to you.