The Truth About Your Vitamins Being Made in a Chemical Lab

Would you like to know if your vitamin C is really vitamin C? Real whole food vitamin C has many health benefits to the body, while “synthetics” are a different story.

The best way to tell if a supplement will be absorbed well is by looking at the ingredients on the label. If you see % Daily Value levels over 40% for one serving, than it is a good indication that you are about to ingest synthetic supplements which are not well absorbed and can damage your cells.

Take a look at any standard multi vitamin and you will see % Daily Value levels in the hundreds and even thousands of percentage for certain vitamins. These synthetic man made chemicals are indeed adding to the stress of you liver, kidneys, and GI tract when they are broken down. A standard vitamin C tab which is not vitamin C but ascorbic acid, and only one component of the C complex, may contain 500 mg of vitamin C. If on the label it says it is made from Rose Hip, a food source, you need to be very leery of it.

You see, in order for 500 mg of “whole food” vitamin C to be put into a tablet or capsule, that tablet or capsule would be bigger than a grapefruit! There may be a tiny pinch of rose hip added to a high dose of ascorbic acid but that is not what most consumers think they are getting. By the way, ascorbic acid was never meant to be the source of nutrient in the food. Its purpose is purely anti-oxidant in nature.

What that means is the food was created to carry nutrients to your cells. The anti-oxidants that occur naturally in whole foods were designed to protect the functional vitamins, minerals, bioflavonoids, carotenoids, etc., from oxidative damage.

Let's say that you went to see your doctor and he had your "file" in his office, which is a record of your personal health information, including test results and medical history. All those pieces of paper have important "information" on them. These papers are kept in a "folder" in order to protect the papers from being lost or damaged in any way. If somehow the papers inside were lost, and the doctor had only the remaining folder, of what value would that be?

The anti-oxidant component of foods is there to protect the important nutrient molecules, just as a folder protects the contents of your file. An empty file will not be of any use, just like a synthetic isolate of an anti-oxidant will not be of use if you are trying to prevent a nutrient deficiency.

In other words, 100 times out of 100, if you were to give a patient with scurvy, a nutrient deficiency disease, some synthetic ascorbic acid, which chemical companies call vitamin C, it will not cure the disease.

Without the P factor, J factor, and T factor found in citrus fruits, scurvy will not be abated. Fruits and berries such as goji, pomegranate, blueberry, camu camu, grape, grapefruit, orange, marula, and papaya, to name a few, are good food sources of real vitamin C.

This is why it is essential to get your vitamins and minerals whenever possible from organic whole foods. Hoffmann-La Roche of Switzerland and BASF of Germany, two well known manufacturers of pharmaceutical products, controlled about 75 percent of the $6-billion-a-year global vitamin business. Yes, they supplied the synthetic vitamin isolates, chemically produced in their labs, which were then put into multi-vitamins and formulas and sold as health boosting nutrients to the general public.

They were finally busted in 1999 for price fixing and Roche paid $954 million and BASF more than $500 million after entering guilty pleas with the US Department of Justice, Canada, Australia and the European Union.

Unfortunately, synthetic chemicals in the form of vitamins still make up 95% all the bottles of supplements sold today. Please read labels and ask questions when purchasing supplements and again, try to buy organic whole food products.

Thomas Von Ohlen MS, NC, is a clinical nutritionist, author of the e-book “60 Days to Healthy Weight Loss and Whole Body Cleansing,” and co-author of the book, “101 Great Ways to Improve Your Health.” He is also the developer of Plasma Pro software, a blood test analysis program for doctors. His FREE newsletter and report on weight loss is available at http://www.healyourbodynow.com