|Are your Vitamins Healthy ?|
Vitamins have come a long way from your "basic multi-vitamin"
There are now vitamin supplements for just about any kind of nutrient deficiency.
If the nutrient is suitable for human consumption, there is a good chance it is available as a vitamin supplement.
Despite the easy access of vitamin supplements, you should use more than the name on the container to help you determine which vitamins to consume.
There is a disparity in vitamin supplements that can affect the efficiency of the vitamins.
To ensure that you receive the adequate benefits of vitamins, you should know what is available to you. In general, vitamins are either synthetic or whole food.
A majority of vitamins that are available are synthetic in form.
Synthetic essentially means that the supplements have been created in a laboratory using a chemical process. The chemicals that are added during this process are usually for the purpose of attempting to equal the potency of whole food supplements.
These added chemicals reduce the natural source of the supplement by as much as 70%.
This reduction translates to the supplement not being able to fully provide the function it set out to provide.
As indicative of their name, whole food nutritional supplements are “whole” vitamins.
These vitamin supplements contain all of the naturally occurring nutrients associated with them or what is technically referred to as the total complex family of nutrients.
Just because a vitamin supplement label says “natural,” that doesn’t necessarily mean that the container is completely natural.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which is responsible for make sure that foods and drugs are safe for the general public, cautions consumers that the term “natural” is a vague term and doesn’t necessarily mean that a vitamin is safe.
Price is often the main criteria that many people use to select supplements.
This is not a recommended approach because synthetic supplements are cheaper to make and result in a lower price for the consumer.
It only makes sense to choose whole food supplements because they are going to provide you the most benefit.
Another reason to choose supplements made with whole nutrients is that synthetic vitamin supplements tend to cause chemical reactions in some people.
You will not find any vitamin labels with the word “synthetic.”
So, how do you know if supplements are comprised of synthetic material or whole foods?
The list of ingredients is the best place to look for tale-tale signs.
Basically, if you review the list of ingredients on a vitamin supplement bottle and see a list of chemicals, there’s a good chance the supplements are synthetic.
Gluconate, acetate, nitrate, chloride, bitartrate, and hydrochloride are common chemicals that make up synthetic vitamins. Yeast, alfalfa, fish oils, citrus, and wheat germ oil are sources associated with whole food vitamin supplements.
You may notice some ingredients on your vitamin label are preceded by a “d” or “di.”
These actually refer to what happens when light passes through vitamins.
Synthetic vitamins will result in light dividing into two fractions, dextro and levo, which results in the “di” before the vitamin name.