Vitamins with the vita-max

Recent questions came about as to whether vitamins from "whole foods" (not to be confused with the Whole Foods Market grocery store) are better than normal vitamin supplements. John Pillepich, PhD, CPhT from Total Health Nutrients was able to provide a good answer. 

No Advantage to Whole Food Supplements

 

So-called food-form or whole food vitamins claim that they absorb better because they are bound to some kind of food base. The products are made by adding regular, isolated vitamins and minerals to a liquid medium containing live organisms, either yeast-based or fungal (mushroom)-based. The slurry is usually “aged” for 24-48 hours, and then dried. Presumably the live organisms have incorporated the vitamins and minerals into their cell bodies, and therefore the isolated vitamins and minerals are now bound up in a “whole food complex”. But, the organism may have selective uptake of the nutrients, and thus not all the nutrients may make it into the cell, and certainly not in the ratios that humans may need. What isn’t taken up is still part of the dried remains, mostly in the original form. Additional nutrients are usually added to get the potencies and ratios that appear on the product’s label.

 

So, what is the benefit of this? Well, not only is there no benefit, the products are actually not as good as the usual vitamin supplement. Why?

 

The body cannot absorb vitamins and minerals bound up in whole food complexes. The whole purpose of digestion is to release nutrients from food, and therefore reduce the complexes to molecular size. Using protein for an example, a protein is reduced from being at polypeptide size, to oligopeptide size, and finally to the sizes meant for absorption: tripeptides, dipeptides, and free amino acids.

 

If a whole food complex was absorbed into the blood stream, the body would recognize it as not-self, and treat it as a foreign invader. This would result in increased inflammation, an allergic reaction, or possibly anaphylaxis, a severe reaction that could result in death.

 

True, whole food vitamins do contain additional nutrients that were in the live organism and growth medium (mostly amino acids and lipids), but, so what? The amounts would be miniscule, and presumably the pills would be taken with food that would contain 10x to 100x more than that.