Vitamins and supplements like melatonin and fish oil offer health benefits but can cause side effects if misused. Learn about the impact of saw palmetto on blood pressure and find the best multivitamins for young women and adults over 50.
Lactose is milk sugar--it's much less sweet than table sugar, and occurs naturally in milk and other dairy products. While you can certainly burn the chemical components of lactose for energy, it doesn't serve unique cellular functions--you can burn other carbohydrates instead with no ill effect whatsoever.
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Digestion is simultaneously a complicated process and a relatively simple one. Chemically, it's quite simple -- it involves breaking the large nutrient compounds in your food down into small nutrient compounds that you can absorb. Logistically, however, this is quite complex.
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Many different calcium supplements are available over-the-counter at health food stores and drug stores. You can use these to ensure that you're getting plenty of calcium, which is an important component of the skeletal system.
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Sodium carbonate and sodium bicarbonate have similar-sounding names and many chemical similarities, but they're used very differently. Sodium carbonate has household and industrial applications but is used very rarely in food and cooking.
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Proponents claim that supplemental papaya enzymes offers several health benefits, from aiding in weight loss to reducing symptoms of digestive discomfort and acid reflux.
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Lactose and sucrose are both common kinds of sugar that feature prominently in the typical American diet. Though chemically similar in many regards, your body digests them differently, using different digestive enzymes. They also have different sources in food.
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In recent decades, the general public has become interested in health-related topics and methods for maintaining and improving health. In response to this, there is an increasingly wide variety of supplements available for purchase at health food and drug stores.
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Glutamic acid and glutamate are the chemical names for two very similar substances. You consume glutamate when you take in protein -- glutamate is a constituent of protein -- or when you eat food that contains monosodium glutamate. Because of the similarities between the chemicals, scientists often call glutamate "
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Sodium nitrate and sodium nitrite are two food preservatives with very similar chemical formulas, but different properties in the body. Sodium nitrate, with the formula NaNO3, helps prevent bacterial colonization of foods. Sodium nitrite, with the formula NaNO2, is a strong oxidizing agent used as a meat preservative.
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