Are you ready for information that could change your entire perspective of the vitamin and supplement industry? Ready, Set, and let’s go!
Vitamins are not individual molecular compounds. Vitamins are biological complexes. Vitamins are biochemical interactions that can only activate when all the components of the vitamin complex are present and working together.
This gets tricky when so called “good vitamin & supplement companies add chemicals & fillers to cut cost, make investors and stockholders happy. The human body does not breakdown chemicals or digest them. However, it does breakdown food which we all know.
Isolates
When isolated from its complex, a vitamin cannot perform its intrinsic function and is, in fact, not a vitamin.
For example, because ascorbic acid, which is the ingredient used in all synthetic Vitamin C supplements, is only one component in a chain of complexes that make up Vitamin C, it is not a vitamin, and its is wrong and irresponsible for manufacturers to label it Vitamin C.
Shocking, don’t you think?
But not really a surprise when you realize that prestigious organizations such as the National Institute of Health, and well-known and respected doctors and health practitioners have been duped as well. They state in their literature that ascorbic acid and Vitamin C are one and the same. And of course, each company uses its arsenal of marketing tactics to compete in a very competitive marketplace. They all claim their formulation is superior, even though they all get their ascorbic acid from the same place, and even though it’s really not vitamin C at all. So then, what is a synthetic “vitamin”? Two things distinguish it; it’s manmade; it does not occur in nature.
First thing to understand, there is a significant difference between a vitamin and a vitamin’s activity. A vitamin is a biochemical complex. Vitamin activity is the actual biological and cellular changes that take place within the vitamin itself. Another thing that is really important for you to know: Vitamins are only necessary in minute quantities. Another falsehood peddled by the manufacturers of synthetic vitamin and supplements.
The body can not make most vitamins. They must be ingested as food. Whole, natural foods are rich in vitamins. Or used to be. But soils have been so disastrously depleted and deluged with pesticides, pollution, and erosion that foods grown today in American soil contain a fraction of the nutritional value they had fifty years ago.
The marketing mavens have been frighteningly successful in creating the myth that vitamins and minerals, isolated from one other and measured out in “proper” quantities, are beneficial.
The truth is vitamins and minerals function together as a complex team. If one part is missing or in the wrong form or in the wrong amount, the entire chain of metabolic processes will not function normally.
Advertising and public relations are so sophisticated that they have us under their control. Only if we make a deliberate and determined effort to always question and research what we put into our bodies will we be able to maintain optimum health.
It bothers me that drug companies and food manufacturers want us to believe we are well informed so they can continue to misinform us. The marketing of synthetic vitamins and supplements has been successful that many nutritionists, therapists, doctors, and health practitioners are unaware that synthetics have no value. Many have been led to believe that some brands of synthetic are more potent than others. I will never, ever buy into this.
Furthermore, as dead, purified chemical, synthetic vitamins stress the immune system as it tries to break down and remove from the body what it regards as a foreign matter.
My advice is next time someone tries to sell you vitamins and supplements ask them how they were formulated.
Dr. Joe Kasper
917 399 9754