Not all vitamins are created equal, at least that’s the claim of a new kind of vitamin supplement. Whole Food Vitamins look to be the future of nutritional supplements.
Whole food supplements are actually quite simple. Their name says it all: Supplements crafted from concentrated whole foods. Although this may seem like the way all vitamins should be made, it is actually a very different method that differs from the way that vitamin supplements are usually made.
Traditional vitamin supplements are highly concentrated doses of vitamins that are removed and isolated from the basic foods where they are naturally found. In some scenarios, vitamin manufacturers use chemicals to synthesize vitamins, skipping over naturally occurring vitamins altogether. This is not the case with whole food supplements.[I:http://www.naturmeds.info/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/BenjaminAndrews10.jpg]
Whole food supplements retain every part of the original food that they are found in, only the food is compacted so as to concentrate the vitamins. According to the author of Whole food Nutyrition: the Missing Link in Vitamin Therapy, Vic Shayne, PhD, “Vitamins never exist in isolation, but rather within an interwoven complex of food nutrients and substances along with myriad co-factors and synergists.”
Understand that by using whole food supplements to get vitamin A, for example, you also get retinal, retino, retinoic acid, grass factors, carotenes (there are more than 500 carotenoids in nature), fiber, natural sugars, essential fatty acids, minerals (such as zinc and copper), lipids, bioflavonoids, and nutrients that fall under the broad spectrum of “phytochemicals,” ranging from terpenes to isoflavones.
At the end of the day, you can’t go wrong with vitamins. Getting vitamins that come with other synergistic food properties may be the best way to get them, and possibly the future of vitamin supplements.
Benjamin Andrews writes and blogs on the topic of the many benefits of Whole Food Supplements as well as various other topics about natural living. To find out more about Whole Food Supplements, go to HEALTHandMEdBlog and read more from Andrews.