Not All Multivitamins Are Created Equally

[Nicholas]

Here is a good article from Dr. Mercola on multivitamins. Most multivitamins are not complete vitamins but just a portion or isolate.

Why You Should Avoid Synthetic Isolates Like the Plague…

In my opinion, if you shop for your supplements at discount stores you may be seriously shortchanging yourself because those products typically use cheap synthetic isolates.

Millions gorge themselves on synthetic vitamins, only to acquire and die from degenerative diseases.

You see, isolated vitamins are partial vitamins, combined with other chemicals. They’re a low-end alternative to whole, real complete food.

When you remove a part from the whole, you get ‘Synthetic,’ ‘Isolated,’ or ‘Fractionated’ pieces of the whole, but it’s simply not the same.

There are four problems with synthetic vitamins…

1. Nature intended for you to consume food in WHOLE form because all the vitamins, minerals, antioxidants and enzymes are together in one package. They work synergistically to give your body the nutrition it requires for optimal health.
2. Your body only absorbs a small percentage of an isolate form of vitamins and minerals – and it utilizes even less. You get the best bioavailability in whole food form.
3. Synthetic vitamins often give you massive quantities of some nutrients (usually the most inexpensive ones) and insufficient quantities of others, not balance.
4. You can experience side effects of synthetic isolates from the additives and the unnatural state of the synthetic supplement.

You’ve heard me say it before… Fast food and a sedentary lifestyle can be a disaster for your health.

Don’t let your multivitamin add to the collateral damage.

In fact, you want to be sure it makes a real and significant contribution to your health, especially if you’ve already adopted healthy lifestyle practices.

After all, I’m quite sure you’re one of the nearly 100% of the human race who wants to feel on top of the world…. All the time.

 

[abstract]

good article, i really like this mercola guy. I've just had a thought, what if we all wrote a "textbook" where we put all of our best health information in a simple, non-confusing format?

Oh, blast, my lights are flickering...

 

[Gertrudes]

That was enlightening. I really never thought much on what was on supplements appart from additives.

Problem is, the supplements such as the ones he recommends are really expensive...

 

[abstract]

Problem is, the supplements such as the ones he recommends are really expensive...

But he is also trying to encourage people to eat whole foods. Granted, it could partially be a marketing/advertising thing, so i guess buyer beware.

 

[RyanX]

There are also a number of vitamins that people just have poor genetic machinery for assimilating. This is a big problem with B-vitamins. I haven't read all the health books yet, but I have read The UltraMind Solution where Mark Hyman talks about the differences between various types of a specific vitamin. So, I think there is more to this topic than what Dr. Mercola describes here, OSIT.

 

[Gertrudes]

Problem is, the supplements such as the ones he recommends are really expensive...

But he is also trying to encourage people to eat whole foods. Granted, it could partially be a marketing/advertising thing, so i guess buyer beware.

Yes, and I think he has some good point there. What made me feel...I suppose disheartened is the thought: Will all good supplements be that expensive? Am I really doing good to myself by taking the ones I am taking? I don't know, but I realized it really isn't as simple as just going online and checking additives.

Added: that's good to know RyanX, I'm reading it at the moment.

 

[flashgordonv]

Well, I guess one of the things he is doing is drawing attention to the fallacy that just because you are taking a supplement you are doing yourself good. All supplements are not created equal and he is highlighting that synthetic can be dangerous. It comes down to being prepared to do the research, to get the data to validate what is the right supplementation for you. If you peruse sites like iHerb and the Organic Pharmacy, you find a huge range of supplementation for a large number of suppliers with a huge variation in prices. I've been researching in this space on an off for the last 10 years and i have come to the firm conclusion that there are just as many con artists and fraudsters selling supplements as in any other sales environment. The health food industry is just as ponerised as any other industry in our supposedly enlightened society.

You have to be prepared to read the labels, look at the ingredients, look at the additives and the so called non active ingredients and make decisions. And unfortunately the quality supplements, made from whole foods and appropriate ingredients with no nasties added, are more expensive than the others. It is amazing how many supplements contain magnesium stearate, which is produced by hydrogenating cottonseed oil, and the only reason it is in the products is because it is an excellent industrial lubricant and by using it, manufacturers can run their equipment faster and make the supplements quicker and more cheaply - oh and it does not appear to be beneficial to us. So you have to decide whether to buy cheap supplements which might be harmful to you at worst or not actually doing anything for you at best, OR to invest the money in good quality products.

Mercola does sell his own products, it is a relatively limited range and he does promote it with this sort of information. As far as I can see, he identifies an issue with the existing market, he finds the right answer, packages it and sells it. But to be fair to him he also comments widely on issues for which he does not have products and he is certainly a big advocate of healthy eating regimes.

 

[theos]

Here's some more on synthetic vitamins. doctorsresearch.com/articles4.html

What is Your Vitamin Really?

Most vitamins in supplements are petroleum extracts, coal tar derivatives, and chemically processed sugar (plus sometimes industrially processed fish oils), with other acids and industrial chemicals (such as formaldehyde) used to process them [1-5]. Synthetic vitamins were originally developed because they cost less [7]. Assuming the non-food product does not contain fish oils, most synthetic, petroleum-derived, supplements will call their products ‘vegetarian’, not because they are from plants, but because they are not from animals. Most vitamins in vitamin supplements made from food are in foods such as acerola cherries, broccoli, cabbage, carrots, lemons, limes, nutritional yeast, oranges, and rice bran (some companies also use animal products).
...
Although many doctors have been taught that food and non-food vitamins have the same chemical composition, this is simply untrue for most vitamins. As shown in table 2, the chemical forms of food and synthetic nutrients are normally different. Health professionals need to understand that since there is no mandated definition of the term ‘natural’; just seeing that term on a label does not mean that the supplement contains only natural food substances. One of the best ways to tell whether or not a vitamin supplement contains natural vitamins as found in food is to know the chemical differences between food and non-food vitamins (sometimes called USP vitamins). Because they are not normally in the same chemical form as vitamins found in foods, non-food vitamins should be considered by natural health professionals as vitamin analogues (artificial imitations), and not actually as true vitamins for humans.

There is also discussion in this article on the physical structure of synthetic vs whole food vitamins. Both Mercola's article the one quoted above raise some interesting points.

From Combining Old and New: Naturopathy for the 21st century pg. 180:

Natural food complex vitamins are in the physiochemical forms which the body recognizes. They generally are not crystalline in structure, contain foood factors that affect biovailability, and appear to have smaller particle sizes. This does not mean that USP vitamins do not have any value (they clearly do) but studies (which may or may not conform to peer review standards) have shown that vintmins in natural food complexes are better than USP isolated vitamins.

I think it goes a bit deeper than whether a supplement contains stearates or fillers or what have you. If the structure of the synthetic vitamin itself is not readily bioavailable you really won't be getting the benefit that you expect from vitamins.

 

[abstract]

It is amazing how many supplements contain magnesium stearate,

AWWWWWWWWWWWW, ****! There's always one more thing to get rid of.

All my supplements have magnesium stearate in them. Blast it.

I'm not in a bad mood, it's just annoying sometimes, sorry if this is just noise.

 

[flashgordonv]

I think it goes a bit deeper than whether a supplement contains stearates or fillers or what have you. If the structure of the synthetic vitamin itself is not readily bioavailable you really won't be getting the benefit that you expect from vitamins.

I agree with you. It is symptomatic of the issue. There is a lot more to consider regarding supplements than just buying the cheapest as they are not all the same in so many ways.

 

[Lauranimal]

For anyone interested, there are several multi's I think are worth the money.

Garden of Life: Vitamin Code, Vitamins derived directly from raw food and then combined with whole food concentrates to lend more antioxidant and cell protection activity. It is a bit more expensive than most vitamins, but well worth it. I would rather spend a little more and get something out of it, than spend less and get virtually nothing out of it. They make men's and women's one a days and 4 a days and recently came out with a prenatal and a pretty amazing calcium supplement derived from algae.

Megafoods: Also derived directly from food, though not raw food. A good deal more expensive, but if you need extra Iron, they make an excellent iron supplement called, Blood Builder.

New Chapter: Again.... right up there in the expensive arena. These are considered 'Food-grown". They start with USP vitamins and feed them to sacromyacies (sp?) yeast. The yeast which already have a nice nutrient content are then fractionated (killed) and fed to friendly bacteria. Yes... the same friendly kind that live in your gut. And through this process, the USP vitamins are rendered in to a rich matrix that the body sees as food. Kind of a fermentation process. The only caveat being that, the friendly bacteria they use to digest the yeast is grown on barley. Not a problem if you are avoiding gluten in general, but for one who suffers from the disease known as Gluten Induced Enteropathy (AKA celiac disease), it can have an accumulating adverse effect. (They are actually a really neat company and their supercritical herbal extracts are amazing!)

I tried juicing for a while, but I just cant keep up with it. Plus it's a pain in the buns to clean. (anybody want to buy a $300 double-bore Kenpo juicer? LOL!)

Anyway... I am sure there are many more very good food-state vitamins, but I thought I would share these few that I know for certain have an excellent quality.

 

[anart]

It is amazing how many supplements contain magnesium stearate,

AWWWWWWWWWWWW, ****! There's always one more thing to get rid of.

All my supplements have magnesium stearate in them. Blast it.

I'm not in a bad mood, it's just annoying sometimes, sorry if this is just noise.

Don't throw them out, just try to look for supplements in the future without it - at this point you're better off getting the supplements with the stearate than not getting the supplements at all. osit.

 

[flashgordonv]

It is amazing how many supplements contain magnesium stearate,

AWWWWWWWWWWWW, ****! There's always one more thing to get rid of.

All my supplements have magnesium stearate in them. Blast it.

I'm not in a bad mood, it's just annoying sometimes, sorry if this is just noise.

Don't throw them out, just try to look for supplements in the future without it - at this point you're better off getting the supplements with the stearate than not getting the supplements at all. osit.

Agreed. It was a shock once I learned about magnesium stearate to then go study all my supplements and see how many contain it. An added nuisance as I tend to buy in bulk off the net to save freight costs, so lots of magnesium stearate in the cupboard as well. It was also quite hard to find manufacturers who do not use it. Pure Encapsulations are one I found from another thread in the diet section here.

 

[abstract]

Don't throw them out, just try to look for supplements in the future without it - at this point you're better off getting the supplements with the stearate than not getting the supplements at all. osit.

I agree, and i won't throw them out. I found a couple links regarding magnesium stearate.

http://www.drrons.com/beware-of-additives-in-supplements.htm

https://logosnutritionals.com/articles/naturalhealthgener/ismagnesiumstearat/?gclid=CO-ek_XCyJ8CFSkZawodezPv0A

oh, and this on wikipedia: "Magnesium stearate is a major component of "bathtub rings". When produced by soap and hard water, magnesium stearate and calcium stearate both form a white solid insoluble in water, and are collectively known as "soap scum"."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnesium_stearate

 

[Mrs. Peel]

Mercola does sell his own products, it is a relatively limited range and he does promote it with this sort of information. As far as I can see, he identifies an issue with the existing market, he finds the right answer, packages it and sells it. But to be fair to him he also comments widely on issues for which he does not have products and he is certainly a big advocate of healthy eating regimes.

I also subscribe to Mercola's e-mail newsletter. I'll admit he's got the right idea, has helpful information, and tries to raise awareness of controversial practices, but bottom line is he needs to make money off his site, hence the more expensive products.

Re supplements, I usually try and find them in capsule form as I think they are easier to break down and digest than hard little pills which can er, go in one end and out the other without you ever absorbing any nutrients.