More on vitamins

The major vitamin makers buy the cheapest ingredients on the international market. 
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These tend to be synthetic versions of the vitamins they list on the label. .
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Then they blast them into a tiny little pellet and coat it with chemicals.
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Your body can’t absorb most of what’s in them, so it just eliminates them. 
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So you’re not getting any real health benefit.
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My patients were just throwing money away without getting results.
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These synthetic vitamins are made in a lab, whereas natural vitamins are from a source that occurs in nature.
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This is important for you because you are designed to get your vitamins and other nutrients from food.
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Vitamins from natural sources will have with them all the trace minerals, enzymes, and co-factors that make them work so well in nature.
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Vitamins constructed in the lab have none of these. 
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They’re stripped-down copies… isolated chemical forms of the real thing.
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Meanwhile, it’s tough to know what you’re getting. 
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Many “health” websites will advise you not to take a vitamin if it has a “chemical-sounding name” because it’s probably synthetic.
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The problem with that advice is most vitamins themselves have chemical-sounding names.
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Vitamin C is called ascorbate. 
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Vitamin D is cholecalciferol. 
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Vitamin B-6 is pyridoxine. 
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Vitamin B-12 has the tongue-twisting chemical name cyanocobalamin.
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You can’t avoid these… they are your vitamins.
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So forget about the chemical-sounding names. 
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Making sure your vitamins are real is much easier than that
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Here’s what to do instead:
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Look for what’s NOT in your vitamin.
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Well-made, natural vitamins leave out things like sugar, yeast, salt, gluten and artificial colors and preservatives
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Remember though, that vitamins do need some kind of filler to physically keep the pill from falling apart.
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That means there will often be some kind of cellulose or stearate in them. 
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But don’t worry, they’re harmless.
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Look for the letters d and l.
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Let me explain…
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You can clearly tell the difference between synthetic and natural forms of vitamins when you shine a simple beam of polarized light on them.
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A natural vitamin will bend all the light to the right because of the way the molecules spin together in nature. 
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The Latin word for right is “dextro,” so you’ll often see a lower case “d” in front of the vitamin name if it’s natural
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But if you send that same beam of light through a synthetic vitamin, it will bend both ways. 
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Half to the right, and half to the left. 
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The Latin for left is “levo.” 
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Put that together with “dextro” and you have the “dl" you often see on labels at the beginning of a synthetic vitamin’s name.
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The best example is vitamin E.

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There’s plenty of evidence your body uses the natural form – d-alpha tocopherol – much better than the synthetic dl-alpha tocopherol.
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Like the study done last year which found that the natural form had significantly higher antioxidant effect.1 
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And in an animal study, the natural form was absorbed much better. 
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The animals were given more than twice as much synthetic vitamin E and still didn’t have the same serum levels as the ones given the natural form.2
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A synthetic vitamin is sort of like a reflection in a still pool of water… it looks like the real thing, but it’s far from it.
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To Your Good Health,
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Al Sears, MD