Your Nutritional and Vitamin Supplement Information Resource

posted by Ronald on Oct 24

When we take a vitamin supplement, one of our main concerns or questions should be about bioavailablity.  Bioavailability is the rate at which the nutrients of a vitamin supplement can be absorbed by our bodies.  If the supplement is not absorbed then our body’s cells do not benefit from taking the supplement.  We actually flush the vitamin supplement down the drain!  What a waste of time and money.

So if we are concerned about bioavailability and a whole food is bioavailable - meaning our bodies will readily absorb a whole food - then why wouldn’t we demand that our vitamin supplements be whole foods?  It is interesting that the benchmark to which scientists compare absorption rates of compounds that are used to make pill-form supplements and other non-whole food supplements is to that of a ‘whole food.’  Our digestive tracts knows how to readily digest real food (whole food) and often has difficulty digesting synthetic (man-made) pills.  Apparently so does the scientific community. 

But when reviewing whole food supplements we often get a question regarding the FDA’s daily recommended allowance in the form of ‘why doesn’t my whole food supplement list the vitaimins on it?’   It’s for the same reason that the FDA doesn’t slap a label on an orange or a head of lettuce.  It’s a whole food!  Whole foods contain more than the 33 nutrients the FDA has identified - they contain tens of thousands of phytonutrients.  But they contain them in amounts that are not artifically controlled by humans.  To put the label on an orange, or your whole food supplement for that matter, you would need to artificially inject them with synthetic vitamins!  That’s something I prefer not to do!

For a complete article on whole food nutrition visit:

http://www.pillfreesupplements.com/Whole_Food_Nutrition.php