Choline is an essential nutrient. This means it’s required for normal bodily function and human health. Though your liver can make small amounts, you must obtain the majority through your diet. Choline is an organic, water-soluble compound. It is neither a vitamin nor a mineral.
However, it is often grouped with the vitamin B complex due to its similarities. In fact, this nutrient affects a number of vital bodily functions. It impacts liver function, healthy brain development, muscle movement, your nervous system and metabolism. Therefore, adequate amounts are needed for optimal health. Choline is an essential nutrient that must be included in your diet to maintain optimal health.
Four Benefits of Choline: Choline plays an important part in many processes in your body, including:
1. Cell structure and Messaging: It is needed to make fats that support the structural integrity of cell membranes. It is also involved in the production of compounds that act as cell messengers.
2. Fat transport and metabolism: It is essential for making a substance required for removing cholesterol from your liver. Inadequate choline may result in fat and cholesterol buildup in your liver
3. DNA synthesis: Choline and other vitamins, such as B12 and folate, help with a process that’s important for DNA synthesis.
4. A healthy nervous system: This nutrient is required to make acetylcholine, an important neuro-transmitter. It’s involved in memory, muscle movement, regulating heartbeat and other basic functions.
Food sources: Eggs, liver, and peanuts, are especially rich in choline. Major contributors to choline in the American diet are meat, poultry, fish, dairy foods, pasta, rice, and egg-based dishes. Spinach, beets, wheat, and shellfish are also good sources of the choline metabolite, betaine.
SUMMARY: Choline is involved in many different processes, such as cell structure and messaging, fat transport and metabolism, DNA synthesis and nervous system maintenance.
