When the average person makes the decision to add a nutritional supplement to their diet, a multivitamin is likely to be the first choice. That’s because to most people it feels like “taking out insurance” on their health.
In fact, multivitamin supplements are regularly used by one-third of all adults in the world and are the most common Traditionally, a daily multivitamin is meant to avoid nutritional deficiency. The specific combination of vitamins and minerals is designed to resemble healthy dietary patterns, especially that of regular fruit and vegetable consumption.
The only problem is… many commercially available multivitamin supplements simply don’t work. That’s because they’re made up of isolated, synthetic compounds that are chemically and structurally different from the actual “vitamin complexes” found in real foods.
But before we get into this, let’s be clear as to what exactly vitamins are. By definition, they are organic substances that originate mainly in plants and are essential in small amounts for our health, growth, reproduction, and maintenance.
Vitamins need to be a regular part of our diet since they either cannot be made at all or in sufficient quantities in our bodies to do their job properly. Finally, each vitamin performs a specific function – one vitamin cannot replace another.
This is the problem… most multivitamin supplements today contain chemicals that were never part of our natural diet, do not originate in plants, and are unable to perform vitamin-like activities in our bodies.
All this has led some health experts to suggest that commercially available multivitamin supplements should actually be labeled as “non-food vitamin imitations.”
Do You Really Need a Multivitamin Supplement?
If you’re like the majority of people nowadays, you’re buying your food ready-to-eat instead growing it yourself. This increasing trend has led to the rise of a massive food industry, for which the health of the end-user is considered secondary to profit margins.
Correspondingly, there’s a growing school of thought that the poor nutritive quality of our food lies at the root of all of our health problems today. The nutrition we should get, but don’t, from our diet weakens our immune system and directly impacts our health. This increases our susceptibility to infections and diseases − including cancer.
The Scary Truth About What’s in Most Multivitamins
For decades the “natural” health industry has been talking up vitamin supplements as being essential for a healthy and productive life. However, most commercially available vitamins today are far from being “natural organic substances that originate primarily in plants.”
Instead, the frightening truth is… most vitamins today are derived from petroleum extracts, coal tar derivatives, chemically processed sugar, and industrially processed fish oils. Even worse, acids and industrial chemicals such as formaldehyde are used to make them!
Not surprisingly, synthetic vitamins were originally developed because they were easier to mass produce and cost less.
As an aside, did you know that manufacturers of petroleum-derived supplements cynically call their products “vegetarian” – not because they are from plants, but because they are not from animals?
Also, some brands of synthetic vitamins are labeled “organic” because they contain carbon… which by definition would mean that all hydrocarbon petroleum derivatives should be organic.
How Do Non-Food Vitamins Differ from “Real” Vitamins in Foods?
First of all, the physiochemical forms of many vitamins present naturally in foods are very different from their synthetically prepared versions which are known as “analogs.”
For instance, vitamin A is present in foods as retinyl esters and mixed carotenoids – while synthetic vitamin A analogs include vitamin A acetate and palmitate, and isolated beta-carotene.
Similarly, the food forms of vitamin C include two variants of ascorbic acid, as well as their salts and other derivatives. The synthetic analogof vitamin C is made up solely of isolated, crystalline ascorbic acid.
In other words, most commercial non-food vitamins are artificially prepared chemical substances obtained from non-organic sources that are chemically and structurally different from the healthful vitamins present naturally in foods.
This fundamental difference has many major consequences for the “bioavailability” and actions of food-sourced vitamins relative to synthetic vitamins in your body. Bioavailability refers to the proportion of a nutritional supplement that enters your bloodstream and is able to have a biological effect in your body – and the physiochemical form of a nutrient is a major factor in this.
Food-sourced vitamins are more easily absorbed and used by your body relative to their non-food, synthetic analogues, for three main reasons:
- Food-sourced vitamins exist in forms which your body recognizes.
- Particle size is an important factor in nutrient absorption, and food-derived vitamins appear to have smaller particle sizes for better absorption.
- So-called “co-factors” present in the same foods as food-sourced vitamins appear to boost their absorption because of their interactions with each other.
In reality, food-sourced vitamins are biological complexes containing multiple components. Functional vitamin activity can only happen when all the co-factors and components of the vitamin complex are present and working together synergistically.
When isolated and separated into artificial chemical forms, these purified, crystalline synthetic compounds are no longer actual vitamins. Indeed, published scientific research shows that food-derived vitamins are nutritionally superior relative to their synthetic analogs.
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