Synthetic Vitamin

Are You Wasting Your Money
on Synthetic Vitamins?

By Heidi Dulay, Ed.D., N.C.

If you’re one of the millions of Americans who take vitamins everyday, you may not be getting what you think – Chances are you’re taking a synthetic vitamin, like most everyone else is.

“Yep. Most expensive urine in the world.”
Image by Mike Adams – naturalnews.com

And that’s the problem – 90% of synthetic vitamins pass right through you! That’s why people joke about Americans having the most expensive urine in the world.

But for some people it’s not funny. Studies show that synthetic vitamins might even be harmful.

3 Studies

#1. Study using synthetic beta carotene and Vitamin E halted.

29,000 male smokers were given synthetic beta carotene and synthetic Vitamin E. The study was stopped when rates of lung cancer, heart attacks and death increased. - New England Journal of Medicine, 1994

#2. Birth defects increased for women on synthetic supplements
22,000 pregnant women were given synthetic Vitamin A. The study was halted because birth defects increased 400%. - New England Journal of Medicine, 1995

#3. Men get thickened arteries on synthetic supplements.
Men who took 500 mg of synthetic Vitamin C daily over 18 months showed signs of thickening of the arteries. - Reuters Health, March, 2000

Zoltan P. Rona, M.D., says that while a healthy person will not drop dead immediately after ingesting synthetic supplements, "the long-term consequences of continuous, daily intakes are potentially dangerous."

Reactions include fatigue, memory loss, depression, insomnia and potential liver disorders.

Why would makers of health products let this happen? Maybe they got carried away with concerns about shelf life, the look and taste of products, machine requirements, and manufacturing costs. Whatever the reasons, it appears that synthetic vitamins are mostly useless and might even be risky.

How to tell if your vitamins are synthetic

1. Look at the names of the vitamins and minerals in the “Ingredients” listing on the label of the bottle. (You may need a magnifying glass J.)   A vitamin or mineral is synthetic if only its chemical and/or popular name appears, with no plant source. See the sidebar for an example of such names.

2. Synthetic supplements also often contain weird ingredients, including:

• Additives : Glucose, sucrose, starch, microcrystalline cellulose etc. for binding or dissolving ingredients, or for texture and taste.

• Artificial colors, like FD&C Blue #2 Lake, or FD&C Red 40

• Preservatives: sorbates (eg, Polysorbate 80), benzoates (eg, sodium benzoate), nitrites (eg, sodium nitrite), sulphites (eg, sulphur dioxide)

The weird ingredients are underlined in the example in the sidebar. As required by the FDA, ingredients are listed in order of quantity – largest first.

From the label of a popular synthetic multivitamin seen on TV

Ingredients: Calcium Carbonate, Calcium Phosphate, Magnesium Oxide, Potassium Chloride, Microcrystalline Cellulose, Ascorbic Acid (Vitamin C), Gelatin, Starch, DL-tocopheryl acetate (Vitamin E), Crospovidone, Hydroxypropyl Methylcellulose, Niacinamide, Zinc Oxide, Calcium Pantothenate, Glucose, Silicon Dioxide, Titanium Dioxide, Manganese Sulfate, Magnesium Stearate, Pyridoxine Hydrochloride (Vitamiin B6), Sucrose, Cupric Oxide, Riboflavin (Vitamin B2), Beta Carotene, Triethyl Citrate, Thiamine Mononitrate (Vitamin B1), Vitamin A, Vitamin D, Lactose, Polysorbate 80, Chromium Chloride, Borates, Folic Acid, Potassium Iodide, Sodium Molybdate, Sodium Selenate, Biotin, Cyanocobalamin (Vitamin B12), Sodium Metavanadate, Nickelous Sulfate, Phytonadione (Vitamin K), FD & C Blue #2 Lake, FD & C Red 40 Lake, FD & C Yellow 6 Lake. (“Weird” ingredients highlighted in red.)

Your vitamins are not synthetic if they are listed with their whole food source.

For example, “Vitamin C (from camucamu fruit)” indicates that you’re getting the Vitamin C, along with the other nutrients it lives with in the whole fruit. Not just the isolated vitamin C made in a lab. Or “Vitamin A (100% as beta carotene from Dunaliella)” - that means the seaweed Dunaliella is the source of Vitamin A in this supplement. Most of the ingredients in a whole food supplement are listed using the names of the actual fruit or vegetable, like “blueberry” or “broccoli”.

A Solution

There’s a new class of supplements called “whole food supplements” – single whole food vitamins (like Vitamin C from rose hips or camucamu), or whole food multis.

“Whole food ingredients naturally contain the hundreds of “cofactors” the body needs to absorb vitamins.”

The ingredients in whole food supplements are primarily concentrated forms of the vegetables, fruits, herbs or spices, known to be rich sources of vitamins and other known nutrients. They usually do not contain artificial colors, preservatives and other toxic additives. Whole food ingredients naturally contain the hundreds of “cofactors” (other nutrients) the body needs to absorb vitamins.

When cofactors are missing, as they are in synthetic vitamins, the body may treat the vitamin as a foreign substance and eliminate it. Or it may grab the needed cofactors from its own organs, bones, muscles and other tissue. In other words, your body starts eating itself. Over time, this depletes the body, causing disease and degeneration.

Whole food supplements solve these problems while providing vitamins the body can absorb.

Dr. Heidi’s ongoing quest for all things healthy started with two personal battles – living down an embarrassing childhood nickname “Walking Ball”, and battling cervical cancer in her early thirties. Now, more than 20 years later, she’s in peak health and lives to spread the word. Dr. Heidi teaches Comparative Dietary Approaches, a core course in the Masters Program in Nutrition at John F Kennedy University, Pleasant Hill, California. She leads product development for Whole Food Nation, and guides clients with her Little Spa programs in nutrition and holistic health. She holds advanced nutrition certifications from Bauman College, a Master of Science from Stanford, and a Doctor of Education degree from Harvard.