|
Article:
Are 90% of Your Vitamins Going Down the Toilet? by: Warren Matthews If you live in the USA it is likely that you have been exposed to advertising suggesting that 90% of the vitamin tablets that you are taking are going down the toilet. Because these claims are so wide-spread I feel that is appropriate to address the issue of bio-availability and sort out the fact from the fiction. Is this claim true or not? The answer is not a definitive yes or no because there is no benchmark given in which to base the claim on. I'll try to explain. Supplements are a bit like cars. For example, at one end of the spectrum you may have a Russian built Lada which are cheap, utilitarian and very unreliable (at least they used to be) and cost a few thousand dollars or you may have a Rolls Royce which is the ultimate in luxury motoring and reliability and will set you back around a half million dollars. There is no comparison between the two vehicles. The same principle applies to supplements You can buy cheap supplements at the supermarket and what you get is a product which is manufactured to a price. This means that the cheapest possible ingredients are used as well as the cheapest excipients which bind the ingredients together. To give you an idea of just how big the difference of ingredient costs can be I will quote an example of one nutrient... Beta Carotene. The overwhelming majority of manufacturers use synthetic beta carotene (even those producing the more expensive brands). The cost of synthetic beta carotene to a manufacturer is around $60 per kilo. However, the 98% pure natural crystalline beta carotene that we use in our Total Balance costs over $'2
|
