How Do I Choose a Vitamin Supplment?
Look for 100% natural whole food vitamins. Whole food
vitamins are absorbed, used and affect the body just as
natural foods would. Whole foods and whole food complexes
are entire composites, not fractions of vitamins.
Synthetic or fractionated vitamins are only fragments of
the whole vitamin. For example, alpha-tocopherol is only
one part of the vitamin E family; it is missing gammatocopherol,
and the other tocopherols and tocotrienols,
which make up a complete vitamin E.
Fractionating, or pulling apart the constituents that
make up a food changes that food into a non-food.
These non-food fractions are often unrecognizable to the
body, and some can actually create drug-like reactions.
In many cases, these fractions can do more harm than
good, because they are missing some of their components
or cofactors required to function properly in the
body. Because these nutrient cofactors are usually missing
from a supplement, most supplements will actually
“rob” the body of the nutrient cofactors required for
proper functioning, which deprives you of the nutrient
factors you already had in storage! These nutrients could
have been used to repair damaged cells, make new
cells, prevent disease and provide you with the energy
you need to feel and look younger.
Besides being only fragments of the whole vitamin,
many synthetic vitamins were never part of a food at
all. Synthetic vitamins are often created chemically from
carbon sources such as coal tar. Look for names of
foods you recognize such as green pepper, orange peel,
rose hips, acerola cherry, alfalfa, or wild yam rather
than chemical names of nutrients such as pantothenic
acid, thiamin mononitrate, pyridoxine hydrochloride,
calcium pantothenate, ascorbic acid or pteroylglutamic
acid. All labels of truly NATURAL food concentrate supplements
should indicate the exact food source from
which the vitamin is obtained.
How to Choose a Mineral Supplement
Look for Albion amino acid chelated minerals. Amino
acid chelated minerals are more bioavailable than any
other type of mineral. Bioavailability refers to how available
a mineral element is for use in the body. Here is
where mineral supplements vary widely. While some
supplements have a high trace mineral content, those
minerals are not “chelated” and so are not absorbable
and useable in the body. Through chelation, an amino
acid claws onto, or binds to, a mineral. This enables
that mineral to be absorbed through the gut wall.
Albion Laboratories is the only company that holds a
patent on this process. There are other chelation
processes and companies claiming to use chelated minerals.
However, only the chelation process used by
Albion Laboratories is effective. It is the only process
that involves bonding an amino acid to a mineral in the
same way nature does it and is the only way to produce
this natural amino acid-mineral complex. You can recognize
chelated minerals by their suffix (chelate,
chelazome or chelavite) on the label rather than terms
such as oxide, chloride, acetate, sulfate or carbonate.
How to Choose an Antioxidant Supplement
Look for a complete antioxidant. A complete antioxidant
will contain more than one antioxidant nutrient. The
most common antioxidants are vitamin C, vitamin E,
beta-carotene and selenium. These single nutrients have
excellent antioxidant properties, but taken alone they
are not nearly as effective as when taken together or
when combined with other more powerful antioxidants
such as pine bark and grape seed extract. Interestingly,
the body already contains the most potent and powerful
antioxidant available: super oxide dismutase (SOD).
Because SOD is destroyed in the digestive system, it
cannot be absorbed if taken orally. However, research
has shown that providing the precursor nutrients (copper,
zinc and manganese) that form the “building blocks”
of SOD in the correct ratios, the body can produce even
more of its own SOD. SOD is up to 100 times more
powerful than any current single antioxidant known to
man. A truly complete antioxidant will contain a combination
of pine bark and/or grape seed extract, chelated
antioxidant minerals, whole food antioxidant vitamins
and a SOD Precursor System (copper, zinc and manganese).
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