Did you know that most vitamins on the market claiming to be natural only have to be 10% natural to make this claim?!?  It is critically important you learn to read labels to assure receiving your money’s worth.

A product can even be 100% organic and not be natural at all.  To be called organic a molecule need only have at least one carbon atom.  This definition broadens the range from acceptable food sources of animal and plant tissues to raw materials including coal tar and wood pulp (yum!).  Many synthetics are made from coal tar derivatives.  That’s the same stuff that causes throat cancer for tobacco smokers.  Don’t you think your body can tell the difference?  Surely your cells can make a distinction between food and coal tar, just as a fish knows the difference between natural and synthetic sea water.

Many so-called natural vitamins have synthetics added to increase potency, or to standardize the amount in a capsule or batch.  In addition, a salt form is added to increase stability of the nutrient (i.e., acetate, bitartrate, chloride, gluconate, hydrochloride, nitrate, succinate).  These terms added to the vitamin name help you identify synthetics.

Generally speaking, you can identify natural by reading the label and finding a listed “food” source such as citrus, yeast, fish, vegetable, etc.  If a chemical is listed or the source is blank, it is synthetic. (Ask us for our “How To Read Labels” sheet)

The synthetic vitamin dealers would like you to believe that there’s no difference between natural and synthetic, because synthetic vitamins are much cheaper to make and mean much more profit for the company.  They are not efficiently utilized in the body as natural supplements due to the “dl” factor and the lack of complete families which include all surrounding micro-nutrients.  

It’s your choice!