Whole Food Vitamins

Do you remember the Flinstones?  Not the cartoons, but the chewable vitamins that took the form of the loveable characters from the cartoon.  I used to like those.  Too bad they weren’t effective.

Many vitamin companies extract vitamins, purify them and put it into a pill.  What they don’t tell you is that even though all the vitamins are in that pill, your body isn’t likely to absorb much of it because of the purification process.  Most of the foods we eat are made up of cells.  Well; most of the good things we eat are anyway.  The way those cells metabolize nutrients is important because our cells will absorb the nutrients from those cells in a similar way.  The body may absorb purified vitamins if ingested, but it will have trouble because everything necessary for our cells to metabolize a purified vitamin has been removed.

This is why whole food vitamins are so effective.  Some criticize that there aren’t enough nutrients in a daily dose; but there is a reason why the nutrients in whole food vitamins are lower than the crystallized vitamins.  If the body can absorb the crystallized vitamins, it will only absorb up to about 10%.  In order to get enough nutrients needed from crystallized vitamins more is needed in each dose.  A whole food vitamin is metabolized the same way food is, so the body will absorb most if not all of it.  Because the body will absorb more, less is needed in each dose.

More information on whole food vitamins will be coming up in a near future post.  As always, I welcome comments, questions and anything you feel that you would like to add.