Under the patronage of the President of the Northern Technical University, Prof. Dr. Alia Abbas Ali Al-Attar, and under the supervision of the Dean of the Kirkuk Technical Institute, the Department of Community Health Technologies organized a scientific course on “Nutritional supplements, their benefits, and harms.” The lecture was delivered in the session:

1. Assistant teacher Jalnik Hamid Mahmoud / assistant teacher/course director
2. Dr. Laila Abdel Sattar Sadiq/ Assistant Professor
3. Gul Chemin Medhat Abdullah/Assistant Teacher

The course dealt with:

The concept of nutritional supplements, their usefulness and damage to the body, and how to balance between food and nutritional supplements that are given in the form of medicines for the purpose of compensating the body and protecting it from diseases. The course showed that nutritional supplements are complementary preparations that contain vitamins, fibers, minerals, and other nutrients needed by the human body, and are secondary compared to natural food, but their intake is usually due to the lack of some nutrients in the person’s diet or their availability, but in insufficient quantities, Here, nutritional supplements come to complement the human diet and herein lies their importance.

The course aims to:

1. Know the types of nutritional supplements and their sources
2. Benefits of dietary supplements
3. Damages and side effects of dietary supplements
4. Interaction between food and medicine
5. Tips and advice on how to take dietary supplements

The course concluded:

1. Some supplements can improve general health by ensuring that the body obtains an adequate amount of the basic elements it needs to perform its normal functions properly. Therefore it helps maintain the health of the body’s systems and a sense of vitality and activity and gives glasses to the skin.
2. Other types of nutritional supplements can help reduce the risk of developing certain diseases.
3. Some of them can help lose weight and get rid of fat.
4. Food supplements may cause side effects, including health problems such as kidney failure problems or problems with the accumulation of toxins in the liver and the occurrence of problems in the digestive system, and increasing their intake leads to complications such as high blood pressure, heart disease, and taking nutritional supplements increases mortality rates.
5. Nutritional supplements cannot replace healthy meals.
6. It is not possible to take any nutritional supplement without medical advice