[quote]Mattlaw27 wrote:
I just read this article on synthetic vitamins…[/quote]
The article is about 94% crap, and about 6% misrepresented truth.
Let’s take vitamin C as an example. The author tries to claim that ascorbic acid isn’t actually vitamin C, which is ridiculous. But consider this passage, from one of my reference books:
“Albert von Szent-Gyorgyi, the doctor who discovered vitamin C, had actually discovered an entire nutritional complex in ascorbate-containing foods. Milligram for milligram, this ‘natural’ vitamin C proved to be more effective [than pure ascorbic acid alone] … The C complex’s success … can be attributed to the fact that the natural sources contain synergistic components, such as rutin and other bioflavonoids, a copper enzyme (tyrosine), and other factors… Were C complex generally available at a reasonable cost, our dosage requirements could be scaled down considerably.”
So the author of the article started with some known facts, but the most charitable thing one can say is that he did a poor job of presenting them.
(By the way, these days many quality brands of vitamin C do include a significant amount of bioflavonoid complex, which includes rutin along with many other compounds.)
Let’s take another point he tries to make: that synthetic vitamins are mirror-images of natural ones. It’s true that many molecules exist in mirror-image forms. It’s true that our bodies can typically only utilize one of those forms. For example, d-alpha tocopherol is the naturally-occurring form of vitamin E. Synthetic vitamin E is a racemic mixture of the d- and l- forms, which is why naturally-derived vitamin E is always preferable to the synthetic version.*
But to extrapolate from this well-known fact, to claiming that ALL synthetic vitamins are mirror-image versions of the natural ones, is fantasy.
The rest of the article follows a similar pattern of taking grains of fact and spinning outrageous claims from them.
(*Another reason to prefer naturally-derived vitamin E is that it usually includes the entire tocopherol family, not just the alpha form. We now know that the other isomers, especially the gamma form, are important too.)
Conclusion
The idea of getting vitamins from organic sources (foods) is not without merit. Note the examples of the vitamin C and E complexes. Note that the importance of phytonutrients was recognized only relatively recently. There’s certainly more that we don’t know yet about micronutrients.
Personally, I eat a variety of whole foods, and I use a greens supplement. But in addition, I’m a vitamin geek and take about 30 pills a day - that includes fish oil, glucosamine, silymarin, extra B6/B12/folic acid, yada yada. For a multivitamin, I’ve been taking Twinlab Daily One (without Iron) for years. If you pick this one, you’ll need to take a multimineral too, because it has only token amounts of calcium and magnesium (you can’t fit anything close to the optimum amounts of these into a single pill, plus minerals are better taken at a different time of day than your vitamins.) I take Twinlab Tri-Boron Plus but there are other good multimineral formulations.
Twinlab Daily Two might be a better choice if you’re disciplined enough to take your pills twice a day. I’m thinking of switching to it.
