Written by Dr. Michael Colgan in The New Nutrition, a must read!
Every drug store, health food store and supermarket today presents a bewildering array of vitamins, minerals, and other supplements, all claiming to be the best. How do you know which ones are true-to-label, potent, made of the best forms of the nutrients? This article will help you separate the few that are excellent from the masses of ugly.
The majority of multi-vitamins are woefully inadequate. In a recent study at Yale New Haven Hospital, researchers evaluated all common brands of vitamins bought off the shelf at a wide range of stores. Many were made with wrong ratios of nutrients to each other, or contained too little of the more expensive nutrients, or were missing some nutrients altogether. Of the 257 vitamin products tested, only 49 were judged to be adequate.1
Price of Nutrients
Effective potency is only the first problem. Different nutrients vary widely in price. Iron sulfate for example, costs only pennies, whereas pure biotin costs around $6000 per pound, wholesale. Different forms of the same nutrient can also cover a 20-fold range in price. A pill reading, “Vitamin E as mixed tocopherol complex, 400 IU,” can contain anything from a cheap blend of 50% tocopherols and 50% vegetable oil, to a very expensive blend of 95% tocopherols and 5% vegetable oil. The only guide you have as a consumer is the retail price. *** So…You get what you pay for!**
No Natural Vitamins
Many companies falsely label their supplements “natural,” as do food companies (Natural Lays potato chips). Let’s get it straight. Vitamin pill ingredients today are about as natural as a polyester suit. Manufacturers dodge around this issue with phrases like “natural grown,” “natural source,” “food grown,” but the truth is, most pill ingredients are synthetic. That is, they are natural materials (what else is there) treated with various chemical procedures, so that their resemblance to the natural material is remote.
Most vitamin C for example, is made from corn. First the corn is chemically converted to sugar (d-ribose). Then the sugar is chemically converted to pure, ascorbic acid. There is not a molecule of corn left in it. It is the chemical processing that makes it synthetic, not the raw materials it came from.
What about “natural rose hip” or “acerola” vitamin C. The best rose hip and acerola powders contain only a few milligrams of Vitamin C per gram. A 1000 mg pill of natural rose hip Vitamin C would be about the size of a baseball. All these so called “natural pills” are predominantly synthetic ascorbic acid, with a pinch of the natural powder thrown in for marketing.
Then there are those companies who claim that their pills are made of superior vitamins. Let’s get this one straight too. Almost all the vitamin raw materials in America come from a few large companies. Hoffman La Roche makes most of the vitamin C and many of the B-vitamins. Henkel makes most of the vitamin E. Almost all pill manufacturers buy their bulk powders from the same sources that are available to everyone.
Elemental Minerals
Most consumers don’t know that chemical forms of minerals are not elemental forms. A 1200 mg pill of calcium gluconate for example, is only 9% elemental. 2 That is, it contains only 108mg of calcium. To get the RDA for calcium, you would have to swallow eleven of these pills everyday.
The same goes for every mineral. Calcium citrate is only 21% calcium. Chromium picolinate is only 12.5% chromium. Magnesium aspertate is only 11% magnesium. Some forms contain only 1-2% of the mineral element. Manufacturers are supposed to state the elemental amounts on the label, but many do not!
Chemical Forms
By law, supplement pills have to be true to label chemically. That is, if the bottle says the pills contains say 300mg of magnesium, that is all it has to do. But many chemical forms of nutrients are hardly bioavailable at all. They pass right through your 
intestines without ever being absorbed.
Magnesium supplied as magnesium oxide for example, is only one-tenth as bioavailable as magnesium aspertate. But the aspartate form is more expensive than the oxide and takes up more room in the pill. Manufacturers can save money by using the oxide. They can also fit more magnesium into a given size pill by using the oxide, and therefore can put a bigger number for magnesium, on the label. Consumers go for big numbers.
Some manufacturers fudge bioavailability by claiming particular absorption rates, such as 60%, for their multi-nutrient supplements. All such claims are false, because different nutrients and different forms of the same nutrient are all absorbed at different rates. An average absorption rate is advertising nonsense.
Of a 100 mcg vitamin B12 tablet for example, only about 3% is absorbed, whereas calcium acetate is 32% absorbed.2 To say the average absorption rate is 17.5% for the two combined, tells you nothing about either.
*** If you have any questions about supplement companies, dosage, or supplement information please email Skye
or
*** Call the Colgan’s Institute’s hotline used by thousands of people, researchers, agencies, on which brands of supplements we have tested and which ones we recommend. The office numbers is (619) 632-7722
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Pet vitamins and supplements are dosages of extra nourishment added to the food. Office Products Stationeries
Yes, I sprinkle a multi vitmain on my dogs food plus minerals and whichever supplements she needs to be on. Currently she is on a Chinese herbal combination for her blood. Animals are a lot like humans in the way their bodies work.
If you’d like I can recommend some brands.
Skye
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