by Raymond Francis
To choose among supplements by comparing labels can be of little value. Two identical labels can be two completely different products. The difference in quality can depend on the following:
1. Type, quality, and age of raw materials used
2. Method used to ship the raw materials
3. Handling of the raw materials
4. Storage of the raw materials
5. Manufacturing process
6. Packaging
Manufacturers can play many games with how they list ingredients on labels. Without talking to the manufacturer and getting first-hand knowledge of what is being purchased, it is not possible to know what is really in the pill. However, the following is a quick and easy test for assessing the overall quality of a vitamin or mineral supplement. Products that do not meet this test are of low quality. Products that do meet this test may or may not be of high quality, but the probability of good quality is increased. A further investigation into the six items listed above would have to be conducted to truly assess the quality of the vitamin/supplement.
The first thing to look at is the type of chemical compounds that are listed for the minerals. Look at the major minerals like calcium, magnesium and zinc. What forms are they in?
Low-quality formulas will contain cheap ingredients with low absorption rates. Here is what to look for – and avoid:
Low Absorption/Bioactivity
Carbonate (calcium carbonate)
Oxide (magnesium oxide)
Phosphate
Sulfate
Medium Absorption/Bioactivity
Aminoate
Chelate
Gluconate
High-quality formulas will contain more expensive ingredients with maximum absorption such as:
High Absorption/Bioactivity
Ascorbate
Citrate
Fumarate
Malate
Picolinate
Succinate
Tartrate
Now that you have checked the minerals, take a look at the vitamins. The easiest way to check on quality is to look at the B vitamins, specifically vitamins B2 and B6. In a high quality formula, riboflavin-vitamin B2 will be accompanied by its more expensive cousin riboflavin 5-phosphate. Similar holds true for pyridoxine hydrochloride-vitamin B6. A high quality formula will also contain its more expensive cousin pyridoxol 5-phosphate.
Finally, any multivitamin that contains iron, copper or iodine, is an inferior formula. These ingredients are oxidants, which can damage the vitamins/antioxidants contained in the pill.
© 1999, Raymond Francis
Raymond Francis is an M.I.T.-trained scientist, a registered nutrition consultant, author of Never Be Sick Again and Never Be Fat Again, host of the Beyond Health Show, Chairman of The Project to End Disease and an internationally recognized leader in the field of optimal health maintenance.
Source: www.beyondhealth.com
Excerpts from
How to Choose a Good Quality Vitamin Supplement
by Andy Long
There are many steps that the ingredients in your vitamin and mineral supplement (referred to as supplement from now on) have to go through in order to make it all the way through your digestive tract, into your blood stream and ultimately to the location where your body can use them. It’s a complex process and there are many opportunities for the process to not go quite right and prevent your supplement ingredients from getting to where they are supposed to.
Bioavailability is the degree to which a nutrient is available to the body for use. More specifically, for a nutrient to be bioavailable it must be within physical proximity to the cell so the cell can use it. Also, for a nutrient to be bioavailable it has to be dissolved in some sort of solution so that the nutrient can be transported across the cell membrane.
From a non biochemistry perspective, here’s a simple way to picture what needs to happen; the nutrient has to make it all the way from your mouth to the cell and be in a form the cell can use. For bioavailability to occur, certain things have to happen once you put that supplement into your mouth. Here are two of those processes. One is dissolution which refers to how fast a supplement dissolves. An example to help you picture this process would be taking some sugar, putting it in a glass of water and stirring it with a spoon until the sugar disappears.
Another process is disintegration. This is similar to dissolution only disintegration refers to how fast the capsule or tablet breaks into smaller pieces so that the dissolution process can take place.
So how in the world are you going to be able to tell if the supplement you are considering does all this dissolution and disintegration stuff? Fortunately, it’s pretty straightforward to figure out. A good way to know that your supplement is meeting these standards is to make sure there is some sort of “USP” designation on the label of the product.
USP refers to U.S. Pharmacopeia, an organization that was established to create state-of-the-art standards to ensure the quality of medicines that humans use. This includes vitamin and mineral supplements. An example of the kind of USP designation that you want to look for on the label of a product you are considering would be something like, “this product conforms to the USPXXVII requirements for disintegration and dissolution.”
Chelation is very important when it comes to making sure that the minerals in your supplement are bioavailable. Chelation refers to a process that increases the absorption of minerals such as chromium, copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, molybdenum and zinc.
It can be hard to get minerals all the way to that bioavailable state that was discussed earlier. Chelation involves wrapping the mineral in an amino acid so that the body can more easily absorb it. This can improve the absorption of some minerals from only 10% absorption for a non chelated mineral to 45% and more for a chelated mineral.
So when you are looking at the label of a vitamin supplement and you find a trace mineral such as manganese as one of the ingredients, you want to see something like “Manganese (as Manganese Chelate)” on the label. This indicates that the manganese mineral has been chelated.
If the vitamin supplement you are considering doesn’t meet the standards discussed above, it can pass right through your body and do you no good at all. To give you an example of this, I have actually seen a photo of an x-ray taken of a person’s colon area with the vertebrae of their backbone off to one side. In this photo I could clearly see two supplement tablets, still intact, looking like they had just come out of the bottle. These supplement tablets were poorly made, never disintegrated and would soon end up in the toilet. Photos like these are a graphic illustration of the fact that just because you swallow your vitamin supplement doesn’t mean your body is going to be able to use it.
Source: www.trans4mind.com/counterpoint/
