Your nutritional vitamin supplement contains Folic acid, right?

Well it very well may cause you cancer - according to a recently released article!

That’s exactly what Harvard Medical School researchers have said in the March 2008 edition of their Harvard Men’s Health Watch newsletter.

They also cited studies to say that other multivitamin ingredients, namely [tag-tec]antioxidants[/tag-tec], [tag-tec]vitamins B6[/tag-tec], B12 and [tag-ice]Folic acid[/tag-ice] don’t prevent disease (cancer and heart disease).

Now, before jumping to any conclusions, it is VERY important, with all (often sensationalist) negative supplement reports, to DIG DEEPER to see what’s really going on!

As you know some researcher’s research protocols and conclusions can be clouded by vested interests and their results INTENTIONALLY SKEWED. Third party examinations of the cited studies/research usually paint a somewhat different picture/conclusion. (Usually that it is inconclusive and needs further study!).

Over the years there has been studies conducted, which have been ‘sponsored’ by those with ‘anti-supplement vested interests’, such as Big Pharma, where the final conclusion has been pre-determined before the study even begins! This needs to be kept in mind when reading negative [tag-tec]supplement[/tag-tec] studies.

The best course of action is to never take any of them at face value.

In the case of this Harvard Men’s Health watch report, the Vice President for Scientific and Regulatory Affairs at the Council for Responsible [tag-tec]Nutrition[/tag-tec] (CRN), Andrew Shao, Ph.D., has come out to question the research cited in the newsletter and labeled it’s conclusion as “premature”.

Mr Shao helped put this report in perspective for supplement consumers and other interested parties by revealing that the [tag-ice]antioxidant[/tag-ice] studies it referenced have been “heavily criticized by the scientific community.”

He also noted that the Folic acid research cited was “only one study”!

Hmmmmm – ONE SINGLE STUDY!

That lone study found an increased risk of [tag-ice]cancer[/tag-ice] (colon and prostate cancers) among people taking Folic acid. BUT……

……the study involved ONLY people taking large amounts of Folic acid ( a whopping 2.5 times the recommended daily allowance) and who already have an increased risk of developing the [tag-ice]disease[/tag-ice].

The devil is in the details!

NOTE: Harvard professors contacted by Shao also thought the article was premature, and said that they still take their [tag-tec]multivitamins[/tag-tec].

The newsletter article concluded “There is no proof that a daily [tag-ice]multivitamin[/tag-ice] is harmful. Still, it now seems possible that the high levels of Folic acid achieved by well-intentioned people who take a multivitamin and eat healthful [tag-ice]foods[/tag-ice] could increase the risk of colorectal and possible prostate and breast cancers.”

Sources:

Harvard Men’s Health Watch March 2008

Natural Foods Merchandiser March 4, 2008

Brett’s Comments:

An estimated 35 percent of U.S. adults regularly take [tag-tec]nutritional vitamin supplements[/tag-tec]. That includes the industry’s best [tag-ice]super supplements[/tag-ice] that come with a much higher price tag.

That’s a HUGE amount of money each year spent on [tag-tec]dietary supplements[/tag-tec]. ($21 billion actually).

But….. it has been previously estimated that $1 in every $3 used on [tag-tec]nutritional supplements[/tag-tec] is WASTED!

Gosh, could that be your money?

Supplement users, like you and I, have relied on supplement manufacturers for the safety and efficacy of supplements we use. We rely on them to balance the ingredient dose amounts so that if in the unlikely event situations such as the above Harvard report ever turn out to be true, we will not be affected by having consumed excessive amounts of any isolated ingredient.

If you’ve read through some of the articles in at the nutritional supplement truths main site, you’ll already know that relying on supplement manufacturers can be a BIG MISTAKE!

The time has come for supplement consumers to start thoroughly checking up on the manufacturers of supplement(s) they use or those they are comparing prior to purchase.

Why?

Because there are just too many dishonest and disreputable manufacturers out there trying to mislead you.

And on top of that there’s many many others who just don’t have the superior manufacturing know-how to produce a safe, professional, science-based supplement that is highly effective. The kind of [tag-ice]elite supplement[/tag-ice] that savvy consumers like you and I want to take.

You know, even the huge and well known supplement companies who have marketed their way to large scale popular recognition over the years, are cleverly holding back little known key information because it would reveal weaknesses and poor value for money in their products.

Now more than ever you need to check the details of your nutritional supplements to be sure you haven’t been sucked in by deceptive and misleading marketing and that you really are getting all the [tag-tec]health benefits[/tag-tec] you want and are paying for.

Many self claimed super supplements are certainly not all they claim to be and this extends right down to the basic supermarket type multivitamins as well!

The short time it takes to do your supplement homework will be well worth it, for your safety and peace of mind and that of your family if they use [tag-tec]nutritional health supplements[/tag-tec].

WHAT’S IN YOUR NUTRITIONAL SUPPLEMENT?

I don’t know if you’re aware of this or not but the FDA dietary supplement regulations leave it up it up to supplement manufacturers to make sure their supplement is safe and effective, and that the bottle label is a truthful representation of what’s really in each tablet in that bottle.

These FDA regulations don’t prevent manufacturers from creating poorly put together and even [tag-ice]unsafe supplements[/tag-ice]!

Because there’s currently no FDA enforcement, many manufacturers take advantage of the situation by doing minimal to no quality assurance testing of their raw material ingredients.

Reputable supplement manufacturers, however, test ALL their raw ingredients for conformity with each Certificate Of Analysis (COA).

The COA is a document containing detailed information about the identity, quality and purity of the raw material. It should reflect the true and representative properties of the substance in question.

Disreputable manufacturers just don’t test.

They simply rely on the word of the raw material supplier who supplies the COA. This creates tremendous cost savings for them. They’d rather focus on excessive profits at the expense of your [tag-tec]health[/tag-tec]!

In other words they’re gambling with your health!

“How?”

They know all too well that raw ingredients can be adulterated with heavy fillers, some of which can be TOXIC, not to mention impurities and potencies far below what they should be.

And how about this for RIDICULOUS – Raw material suppliers to the nutritional supplement manufacturing facilities are “EXEMPTED” from the new (2007) FDA GMPs !

Are you starting to see what you’re up against here!

Reputable manufacturers are well aware that some raw material suppliers (even including those with GMP accreditation) falsify their COA’s!

That’s why quality focused manufacturers go through the huge cost of testing ALL their raw ingredients.

But then we have the problem of some manufacturers falsifying the results of their own tests!

Argh – What to do!

Despite the fact that there are currently no regulations to do independent, third party testing to verify raw material conformity with COA’s, the absolute best manufacturers DO employ third parties to verify their own test results.

Those third parties should however be accredited state, regional or national bodies. (It ‘s estimated that by the end of this year the FDA will be ready to appoint its own third party auditors.)

And just putting aside the quality and safety issue of raw ingredients for a moment, don’t forget that producing a professional grade supplement is a complicated manufacturing task that has many complex steps.

If there is any technical oversights (ie. MISTAKES!) from a lack of know-how in any step OR cost-cutting shortcuts, then in no time at all supplement quality is rocketing downhill. The end result is a substandard, less effective supplement or in the worse case scenario a potentially dangerous supplement.

So, when it comes to choosing a quality nutritional vitamin supplement or one of the market’s leading super supplements, there are a multitude of options to weed through. Therefore you really do need to examine many details.

This is exactly why it’s so risky selecting on PRICE ALONE!

There is a huge risk that you will end up with a sub-standard supplement that has not been verified through a vigorous quality assurance process.

Don’t take anything for granted when it comes to your health and your family’s health.

Every detail is worthy of your attention!

Don’t trust any supplement or the word of any supplement company, unless you’ve done your homework and are 100% sure it makes the grade!

PLEASE DO YOUR SUPPLEMENT HOMEWORK!!!!

You’ll be relieved to know that dietary supplement quality controls in the USA will soon significantly improve.

The revised (June 2007) FDA cGMP contain much stricter (legislated) standards than what manufacturers have been operating under to date and will weed out a lot (but not all) of the disreputable manufacturers who are only in it for a quick buck. These companies are essentially marketers in disguise.

These new regulations could have been much stricter and to be honest they don’t actually prevent a manufacturer from producing a bad supplement. That’s because, as I mentioned above, the FDA leave it up to the manufacturer to conform.

There is no enforcement!

Nonetheless it will be near impossible for most of the really bad manufacturers to continue.

So, for the sake of your health and longevity, you’ve got to do your supplement homework.

Depending on the number of employees, companies have until June 2010 (at the latest) to become cGMP compliant.

You’re Not Going To Wait?

Great!, – to learn all the nutritional supplement details that you need to check on please visit my are super supplements all they claim to be article.

What To Ask – Ask The Right Questions!

You need to ask the right questions of supplement companies to draw out product and manufacturing details which they have deliberately kept hidden.

This then allows you to fill in the ‘information gap’ and judge the true effectiveness and value for money of a supplement.

Visit my evaluating nutritional vitamin supplements series of articles.

There’s 6 of them covering these crucial topics:

• The Formula
• Ingredient Quality
• Bioavailability
• Manufacturing Standards
• Synergy
• Value For Money

At the bottom of each one you’ll find a list of the RIGHT QUESTIONS to ask for that particular topic (or for a couple there’s a link to pdf files).

Please don’t waste your money, and worse yet, run the risk of potential harm, by taking poorly put together supplements offering poor value for money?

The value for money factor is one of the least understood issues by supplement consumers, particularly when it comes to super supplements made by those gigantic well known U.S based companies.

These companies have huge costs when they manufacture nutritional vitamin supplements and these impact on the product selling price and on which ingredients, potencies, bioavailable forms, and dose amounts that they can afford to include!

The Devil Is In The Details!

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“I would like to know if you have evaluated Dr Ben Kim’s Greens powder”.

Thank you

Response from Brett:

Hi again Tricia

I’ve looked through Dr Ben Kim’s website and I’m sorry to say it’s just another example of a ‘doctor’ taking advantage of consumers lack of knowledge about supplement quality and nutrition.

In my site I have stressed to my readers many times that doctors have no formal training whatsoever in how to formulate professional grade supplements nor how nutrients interact at the molecular level in the body. This is a specialized science.

Any Doctors who have done additional training (and that is very little of them), clearly highlight those qualifications on their websites and it is impossible to miss it – you would instantly know about it.

Dr Kim states on his site that he is a “chiropractor and acupuncturist”. I see no other specialized qualifications other than his experience gained through treating his patients- which still doesn’t make him a credible authority on supplements. Some of the info below and much throughout nutritional supplement truths website shows that people like Dr Kim are not presenting the ABSOLUTE TRUTH.

I’m not saying that you have to have specialized degrees in pharmacology, organic chemistry. Microbiology and the like (I certainly don’t) IF you have access to, and are going to, present the truth and scientifically established facts to your readers and customers. However this is just not the case with the majority of doctors, and other professions who can use the prefix ‘Dr’.

To give you some background, I just spent under 5 mins looking at the [tag-ice]multivitamin whole food[/tag-ice] formula which Dr Kim promotes (I will get to Greens powder which you asked about in a moment) as an exceptional product. That’s all the time I needed to be able to tell you the following.

His statement about the superiority of this supplement is misleading to say the least.

It is a very ordinary [tag-tec]multivitamin[/tag-tec] and at $48 a bottle it is REALLY expensive for what it is. I believe it offers very poor value for money.

To set a comparative benchmark for supplement value for money you might like to compare Greens to the supplement I use – [tag-ice]Total Balance[/tag-ice], (which is reviewed in-depth on [tag-tec]nutritional supplement truths[/tag-tec] (use this link)

http://www.nutritional-supplement-truths.com/Total-Balance.html

and then you will see that Dr Kim’s [tag-ice]supplement[/tag-ice] is missing key, highly efficious (and expensive) ingredients like:

• L-Glutathione

• Resveratrol

• Tocotrienols

• L-Carnosine (in fact no amino acids at all)

• Bilberry

• Turmeric (high potency)

• Zeaxanthin

• Gender support nutrients

and so on.

When it comes to the few expensive ingredients that are there (like cranberry) they are extracts (meaning much weaker efficacy).

Plus the [tag-ice]herbal extracts[/tag-ice] used are not standardized!!! That’s a big no – no (well there’s no info on them being standardized, only extract ratios for each herb used, so its obvious they are not standardized otherwise that would definitely be mentioned as it’s important).

This multivitamin contains 250 mg of vitamin C which is way too much. This is one of the cheapest ingredients which manufacturers use to fill up a tablet (cheaply)- yet Dr Kim boldly goes on to say how this supplement contains none of the usual fillers (pectin etc) which is technically correct.

Instead it is just filled with too much vitamin C (which he doesn’t mention of course). Manufacturers always try to justify these over the top amounts under the “optimal amounts” scenario and that you need more than the RDA recommendations (which health-conscious supplement users do not!).

Now, I know you didn’t ask about this product in particular (and I’m still coming to ‘Greens Powder’) but just wanted to show you how these ‘doctors’ are essentially just marketers in disguise and they are fooling people via their qualifications into buying average products at HIGHLY INFLATED PRICES.

Dr. Kim talks about the normal retail price of this multivitamin as being (over $70) which is CRIMINAL if that is the case, and then goes on to tell you that he only takes a small profit cut so he can offer it to you at $48 a bottle. This is clever marketing - ‘Make the consumer think you are doing him/her a favor – win their trust – establish a relationship with your readers!

So I hope I’ve at least partially set the stage for you with what’s going on here.

Certainly the manufacturing standards for the products he sells are reasonably good.

He talks about how each ingredient is tested for impurities etc but I notice that he does NOT MENTION that there is any independent testing (a must for professional companies) or that each raw ingredient is tested for compliance with its Certificate of Analysis (an absolute must!).

Tricia, you can learn more about these very important issues by going to this page on nutritional supplement truths.com:

http://www.nutritional-supplement-truths.com/super-supplements-2.html

Now, to Greens Powder.

It is described as a “wild-crafted [tag-ice]whole food supplement[/tag-ice]”, not containing any [tag-ice]synthetic vitamins[/tag-ice].

Firstly, these issues about whole food supplements and synthetic vitamins are largely misunderstood by supplement users.

So, you may like to read my earlier posts about ‘[tag-tec]Natural Vitamin Supplements[/tag-tec]‘, ‘Synthetic Vitamins’ and Whole food supplements so as to put these topics in a more correct perspective. (check the ‘Articles’ Archive)

Tricia, the story with Greens Powder is the same as with Dr. Kim’s multivitamin above.

$47 a bottle for this “whole food” supplement is very expensive!

Dr Kim talks about the wonderful results he achieved with his patients conditions after using this formula and I have no doubt in believing those results.

BUT…..

That’s because the body is capable of self-healing most conditions when it receives a daily broad spectrum supply of the right [tag-ice]nutrients[/tag-ice] – especially the potent [tag-ice]phytonutrients[/tag-ice] and [tag-ice]antioxidants[/tag-ice] found in whole foods ([tag-ice]fruits[/tag-ice] and [tag-ice]vegetables[/tag-ice] in this case) and in conjunction with other healthy dietary and lifestyle choices. Like minimal amounts of protein from animal sources, minimal amounts of alcohol, no smoking and so on.

But why pay close to $50 dollars a bottle for these nutrients when you can just eat healthy meals and snacks containing reasonable amounts of raw vegetables and fruits everyday and ultimately take in far more of these [tag-ice]disease[/tag-ice] busting nutrients than what you will get from a bottle of greens powder over 53 days.

The extent of nutritional value which you actually get from whole food supplements is exactly what I discuss in my Whole Food Supplements post which I referred to above.

Tricia, look at content on the greens powder info page:

“Ounce for ounce, it is one of the least expensive [tag-ice]green food[/tag-ice] products available throughout North America – amazing when you consider its exceptional quality and the fact that it has no fillers”.

This is just marketing as you will understand when you read my whole food answer. They are telling you what you want to hear.

So while the formula of Greens is, technically speaking good, in reality it is offering you very little (unless you have an appallingly bad diet to begin with) while costing you a lot.

The answer is to get your antioxidants and phytonutrients from real foods!

Dr Kim says of Greens powder:

“Again, I firmly believe that nothing can substitute for a minimally processed, whole food diet.”

Yes – that’s true

“…. But if you are looking for just one [tag-tec]natural health[/tag-tec] food product that can significantly enhance your [tag-tec]health[/tag-tec] now and as you age, I highly recommend that you try our greens.”

Well, Greens cannot even be compared with Total Balance. They’re not even in the same category.

Total Balance addresses every organ and system in your body and contains important ingredients (like several medicinal herbal extracts) which we cannot take in from our diets – even good diets.

It has an absolute ton more than what Greens offers. The comparisons on nutritional-supplement-truths.com will reveal this to you.

Hope this answer helps you with your decision making Tricia

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This particular supplement was marketed in a very clever way to stress the importance of taking only a natural supplement with natural “whole food” ingredients.

If you read my comments you will see that product is nowhere near as good as it claims to be and because of the huge amount of vitamin C it contains it offers consumers very poor value for money. And some of the “whole food sourced” ingredients it promotes actually do not occur naturally so there’s a nice example of bending the truth to say the least.

Today I thought I would stay with this ‘whole food’ theme.

Another reader (Deb) contacted me early this year and asked my opinion on whole food supplement formulas. You can find her question on the ‘Your Questions’ page at nutritional-supplement-truths.com

So here is a reduced version of my answer to Deb.

Point No.1

Whole foods, fruits and vegetables in this case, are chocked full of crucial vitamins, minerals, fiber, and micro nutrients including potent, disease conquering phytonutrients, a number of which scientists have isolated and many which they believe they don’t know about yet.

Eating whole foods is absolutely the way to go and for a large part of the population there is a need to eat A LOT more –

particularly raw vegetables. Studies show that people (especially adult females) avoid the dark green vegetables in particular. (These are key anti-cancer promoters! )

I eat ALL my vegetables raw. (75% of my entire diet is raw!)

That’s because a extraordinary bio-scientist in Australia explained to me the necessity of this. This amazing lady has a near perfect record of curing cancer in people who seek out her help as well as all kinds of other diseases and medical conditions (all of which stem from nutritional and lifestyle factors!)

So putting aside the extensive on-going debate about the extent to which cooking your vegetables destroys crucial enzymes and nutritional content, I recommend you eat your fruits and vegetables raw.

So, to the question at hand:

SHOULD WE TAKE IN WHOLE FOODS THROUGH SUPPLEMENTS?

Most people under 50 today know about the importance of eating fruits and veggies (and those over 50 always knew) but they don’t want to eat them – certainly not in sufficient quantity. They’ve been cajoled and lured by food scientists/manufacturers/marketers over many years to enjoy the taste of fat and sugar.

But now there appears to be a magic bullet that people, who know they’re not consuming enough fruits and vegetables, have wished for, for so long.

A way to take in enough of those boring fruits and bland tasting vegetables by simply swallowing a whole food pill or three while still continuing to consume nutritionally poor diets full of great tasting (but nutritionally deficient) processed and junk foods.

And whole food supplement manufacturers are playing on this for all they can get.

Unfortunately it’s just not that easy and here’s why.

You would have to be swallowing handful after handful after handful after handful of these whole food vitamin supplements each and every day to be getting the equivalent nutritional value that comes from eating fresh fruits and vegetables.

To take whole foods in supplement form is simply not a practical solution for health conscious consumers!

Consider this:

When preparing a whole food (fruit or vegetable) to be an ingredient in a supplement, the water must be removed by either spray or freeze drying.

After the water is taken out you are left with an amount that is between 1/10 th and 1/50th of the original food mass.

In other words if you had a supplement containing 500mg of a freeze dried whole food then that would be equal to between 2.5 – 5 grams of the real fruit or vegetable.

To put this in perspective, an average sized banana is about 125 grams. So, our 500 mg supplement provides the gross weight and nutritional value of only about 1/25th to 1/50th of a banana!

About one small bite of the banana!

To get the equivalent of one normal size banana you would need to take from twenty five to fifty whole food supplements (500 mg tablets/capsules).

See what I mean?

And I won’t bother to get into the other negatives involved in the preparation of whole food ingredients, like sterilization, milling and distribution times.

Ask yourself why would you bother to purchase a whole food supplement when one decent meal will give you the equivalent nutritional value as about one month’s supply of the supplement.

Think about the cost difference!

And keep in mind that the example above involves only one bite of one type of fruit.

You need a WIDE spectrum of fruits and vegetables daily to take in all the various nutrients you need for good health and to avoid nutritional deficiency based disease.

The Bottom line:

Whole Food Multivitamin Nutritional Supplements SHOULD NOT Be Used As Any Kind Of Substitute For Eating Fresh Vegetables And Fruits!

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]]> http://blog.nutritional-supplement-truths.com/whole-food-supplements-are-they-worth-it/feed/ 2 http://blog.nutritional-supplement-truths.com/natural-vitamin-supplements-%e2%80%93-what-is-natural/ http://blog.nutritional-supplement-truths.com/natural-vitamin-supplements-%e2%80%93-what-is-natural/#comments Thu, 10 Apr 2008 07:38:13 +0000 Brett http://blog.nutritional-supplement-truths.com/2008/04/10/natural-vitamin-supplements-%e2%80%93-what-is-natural/ Any return visitors to nutritional-supplement-truths.com will see that there is a large scale site reconstruction going on.

Everything is being completely revamped with a new format, design, color scheme, interactive pages, new content and some revision of existing content. It’s all being jazzed up!

I’m doing ALL of this myself and since my HTML and CSS knowledge is somewhat limited it’s taking far longer than expected to get all those changes displaying in your browser exactly the way I want.

Anyway for those that saw the old site I’m sure you’ll agree that the new design is far better and easier to move through.

The reason I’m mentioning this is to let you know that because of all this additional work my blog will only be updated 1 to 2 times a week for the coming months (or until it’s all finished).

So I hope you will bear with me and continue to read the juicy supplement and [tag-ice]health[/tag-ice] truths that I have in store for you.

Today’s entry explains the word “natural” as applied to [tag-ice]nutritional supplements[/tag-ice]

and my second entry later this week will look at a related subject – [tag-tec]Whole Food supplements[/tag-tec] and what they really give you.

Here we go!

Natural Vitamin Supplements

What Does That Word ‘Natural’ Really Mean?

The term [tag-ice]‘natural’[/tag-ice] has become a super buzz word in the supplement industry of late. Unfortunately it’s causing a lot of consumer confusion and so-called ‘expert’ argument to say the least.

And recently I considered (for a short 5 min period) of entering into the ma lee when I came across a nice keyword that a web page could be based around. From memory I think the exact keyword was “[tag-tech]natural vitamin supplements[/tag-tec]“.

My initial thought was to write a page around this keyword and then link it to the supplement my family and I personally use. After all, as you’ll understand in a minute, it can be argued that my supplement ([tag-ice]Total Balance[/tag-ice]) has no non- natural ingredients whatsoever!

Therefore it must be a ‘natural vitamin supplement’.

Technically I could argue that Total Balance is ‘natural’ but therein lies the problem because of the very definition of the word ‘natural’.

The more I thought about it the more I realized that this whole topic of ‘natural vitamin supplements‘ is an absolute can of worms. So I decided the best course of action would be to steer well clear of it as a web page and instead address it here in my blog.

The reason I say ‘an absolute can of worms’ is because the term ‘natural’ has a multitude of meanings, all of which are VERY SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT.

The problem is that there is no one definition that is the ‘right’ or ‘correct’ version. We can’t stick something in a test tube, analyze it and say “Yes,” this is natural or “No”, this is not natural.

The thing to remember is that this whole fixation on ‘natural’ comes from clever marketing that presents natural’ as good and ‘[tag-ice]synthetic[/tag-ice]’ as bad.

Thus many consumers have been bombarded into believing this. In the last couple of years manufacturers of ‘natural’ or whole food supplements have really been turning their marketing dials up full load.

Now, there are 2 main aspects to consider when looking at the term ‘natural’.

Firstly, when does something become ‘not natural’?

If a scientist was to make up a small amount of DNA in a test tube from precursors and [tag-tec]enzymes[/tag-tec] (a common process today), is this ‘natural’? In terms of the structure and properties of DNA it is no different to the DNA found in every cell in our bodies.

The only difference is that the DNA in our cells is closely coupled to a raft of other materials (RNA, proteins, cofactors, enzymes etc) that allow it to do its various jobs. If a scientist put the manufactured DNA into your body it would be absorbed and used just as if it were ‘natural’.

In a similar vein I think everyone would agree that [tag-ice]isoflavones[/tag-ice] present in a plant are ‘natural’. But what happens when those isoflavones are concentrated by extraction? Are they still ‘natural’?

How about if we performed a series of concentration steps and wind up with a highly concentrated form (say 90%) of the isoflavones. Are these still ‘natural’? If so, what if we chemically synthesized an identical material that contains 90% isoflavones?

What is the difference between the 90% stuff from the plants and the synthesized material? The two materials are, for all intents and purposes identical.

So why would one be ‘natural’ and the other not?

Can you see what I mean?

The second aspect is that there are lots of things which are ‘natural’ but which are actually bad for you.

For example red kidney beans need soaking before cooking to get rid of a powerful neurotoxin that is present as a normal part of their growth and development.

Many plants produce cyanide as a pesticide.

[tag-tec]Ginkgo Biloba[/tag-tec] extract contains ginkgolic acids that are poisonous.

Yet all these are ‘natural’!

So ‘natural’ is not always best!

That’s why you need to be careful before running off to buy [tag-tec]natural health supplements[/tag-tec] based on that gut feeling you get after reading a supplement company’s nifty marketing presentation.

They’re telling you what you want to hear based on what they and others have led you to believe.

A visitor to [tag-tec]nutritional-supplement-truths[/tag-tec].com asked me recently to comment on a whole food [tag-tec]multivitamin supplement[/tag-tec] for sale at a very well known supplement site.

This is a ‘doctor’ formulated supplement and for those of you who have read through my site, you know my opinion of doctor formulated supplements!

In his marketing spiel this doctor boldly attempts to scare his readers away from any [tag-tec]synthetic vitamin and minerals [/tag-tec](isolates) in supplements by stating that our bodies will only absorb a small percentage of an isolate form of vitamins and minerals and utilize even less. He goes on to say that our bodies absorb much more of the [tag-ice]whole food[/tag-ice] form.

But the truth of the matter is that we don’t actually know this for sure!

We assume it is the case, and we want it to be the case, but we simply do not know!!

I asked a friend in the supplement industry to add some backup on this for me by checking the scientific literature (he has access to a lot more than I do) and he came back to say he COULDN’T FIND A SINGLE STUDY that has looked at the absorption/utilization of ‘synthetic’ materials in the human body versus ‘natural’ materials.

Not a single one!

So you see this is an example of the kind of statement that people want to believe and so they do believe it, but there is no scientific evidence one way or the other.

In situations like this I recommend adhering to a very basic tenet: “If it isn’t documented, it’s a myth”.

Whoever writes the web-page copy for this doctor’s site is very good. They make this particular [tag-tec]multivitamin[/tag-tec] sound like the next best thing in supplements and something that you must have.

However, a closer look at the label reveals the following:

1) Over 75% of the total ingredient load is simply vitamin C, one of the cheapest materials in the supplement industry. That’s shocking!

2) They cannot be “[tag-tec]whole food sourced[/tag-tec]” because calcium ascorbate and niacinamide ascorbate (among others) DO NOT OCCUR NATURALLY !

3) The [tag-ice]amino acid[/tag-ice] chelates of the minerals also do not occur naturally!

—————————————————————————————

The bottom line is that these whole food ingredients are no better in terms of their ‘natural’ function than many other ingredients on the market.

So please keep in mind that there is a lot of supplement information out there that has no actual basis – or, even worse, is just plain wrong. In other words, deliberate lies and misrepresentation of the truth.

Unfortunately we humans have a tendency that if we want to believe something and it is repeated often enough then it becomes ‘true’, even though there may not be a scrap of evidence in support of the idea.

It’s the old story that if you throw enough mud for long enough some will stick.

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Good Health Always!