How Do We Know If Our Body Will Assimilate The Expensive Vitamins That We Buy?  Part 1

I was asked this question in a comment on a recent blog.  This is an excellent question, because the honest answer is that sometimes we might not know and we don’t know how well we will assimilate.

I will be breaking this into about three posts because there is a lot of information needed to help you to make sure that you are getting the best value for your money.

As in other areas, individuals differ in their absorption of nutrients.  For example, rare genetic factors may interfere with our absorption of certain nutrients.  Also, in virtually all cases, absorption is not 100%. In addition to absorption we should also look at effectiveness to see of we are getting our money’s worth. For most of us, in most situations, there are helpful guidelines.  In this blog I will talk about a few guidelines.

1.  Does the supplement you have or are considering break down into a “pile of sand” in plain water within no more than 30 minutes.  If not, you may find that it has gone through your body intact as testified to by many who clean Porta-Potties and septic tanks.  They say that they can even still read the brand on some of them.  The reason it needs to break down in water is that if you are under stress or ill you may not have enough hydrochloric acid in your stomach to break down the supplements.

1a. A secondary thought…is the vitamin/supplement basically food sourced?    Some supplements are extracted from natural foods and others are chemical derivatives.  Unfortunately the term “natural” on the label doesn’t mean that the vitamin or nutrient is from a food source.   The only natural ingredient in a vitamin labeled “Natural” might be just the coating of an otherwise synthetic vitamin. That is legal as long as at least 10% of the whole thing is from a natural source.  Even if the product does break down, are you sure that it is something that you want to put into your body?  We eat all kinds of things that may or may not be good for us, but I know that I, for one, want to be sure that if something says it is going to help my body that it actually does so without harmful side effects.

We must determine from the label or from the manufacturer that the supplement is food sourced.  Here is a word of advice from a renowned cancer researcher whom we are fortunate enough to know, “Sometimes it’s not nice to fool with Mother Nature,” Stephen Chaney PhD.   On the whole, our bodies are no more designed to run on synthetic foods or vitamins than our cars are designed to run on orange juice. There are only a very few vitamins that science has learned how to synthesize well enough to insure the same kind of absorption and performance as the natural ones.

Vitamin E gives us an interesting example is the difference between natural and synthetic Vitamin E.  Some nutrients will have two or more forms. In this case you can tell by the label. If you see “dl-alpha tocopherol,” you have the synthetic molecule, which is less effective. The “d-alpha tocopherol” is the natural molecule and is recognized by nutritional scientists to be at least twice as effective as the synthetic dl molecule.  One little letter, “l” describing its chemical composition reveals that it is synthetic.

You do not have to become a chemist.  A little label reading knowledge will go a long way toward choosing the better vitamin.

That’s it for part one.  We’ll continue the discussion on part 2.
I would love to have your comments and discussion in the comments section.
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