To understand what’s in the bottle you need to know how it’s made. If you don’t want to be bored with the technicalities of why your vitamins are not ‘real’ (for want of a better word) and you want to know how to spot the posers from the natural beauties then you can skip past this post and just go have a look at the next blog entry. For those more curious sorts you best make a cuppa and click read more for the what's-what-where.
How are vitamins made? Well, you would think from plants of course! Yes, this is true but when those vitamins become vitamin supplements there are a few manufacturing processes you should know about which make you wonder, what was the use of the plant to start off with:-
Synthetic Essentially what you have with this type of supplement is a product that the only usefulness of the plant is to be a map – to show a lab technician what, for example, Vitamin C should look like. In this day and age that’s all already been researched so toss that pot plant out the window and chew on your keyboard cause it’s as good as that! A chemical version of the vitamin is isolated and presto! You got what you need! You have a perfect simulation of what you need at least.
Crystalline These are a bit of a cheeky bugger! Wolf in sheep’s clothing comes to mind! Where crystalline derived supplements come from is from food but to get the vitamin from the food high heat temperatures, solvents and chemicals are used in the process. We all know (or should know) that heat kills bacteria > kills vitamins > kills living matter so already, one stage of the manufacturing/ developing process is very flawed. The reason I call these the cheeky ones is that because they once upon a time had a food source and companies can get away with labelling their vitamins “natural” when in all truth as little as 10% of the ingredients need to be.
Whole Food Whole food vitamins are becoming a big thing. More people are looking for them and nowadays it’s a bit like how organic food started: super expensive and bought by few to reasonable as the demand increases. With Whole Food supplements the vitamins are taken from the fruit/veg/animal (yeah some companies sell Bovine hormone, ick!) and processed at the lowest temperatures possible thus not killing the vitamins and rendering them inert. They are kept unchanged down to the molecular level.
Alright then, you know how they are made so what’s all the kerfuffle about? They all sound like they are the same thing. And yes, they are if you were to write their chemical compounds and structure down. But wait! With the magic of science there is, well, no magic. When polarized light gets beamed through synthetic vitamins it bends into two parts those being left and right. Ever see the letters “dl” on the bottle? What that means is “dextro” and “levo” (right and left). To someone with the know-how that tells them that this form, this synthetic, is a copy as the rotation of molecules isn’t identical to the natural form. Synthetic vitamins bend the light in two directions where as a natural vitamin bends the light only to the right. Therefore written down on paper they are the same but not necessarily having the same effect. And so the mask is dropped…
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