How I Know My Vitamins Are Natural

By Dr. Al Sears

Did you know that every vitamin you take can be measured in your blood?

This led to a surprise for me early on in my career. When I started testing vitamin levels in the bloodstream of my most health-conscious patients, even the ones who swore they took a multivitamin every day, they were malnourished!

I had to do some researching to understand why.

Here’s what I learned:

The major vitamin makers buy the cheapest ingredients on the international market. These tend to be synthetic versions of the vitamins they list on the label. Then they blast them into a tiny little pellet and coat it with chemicals.

Your body can’t absorb most of what’s in them, so it just eliminates them. So you’re not getting any real health benefit.

My patients were just throwing money away without getting results.

These synthetic vitamins are made in a lab, whereas natural vitamins are from a source that occurs in nature.

This is important for you because you are designed to get your vitamins and other nutrients from food. Vitamins from natural sources will have with them all the trace minerals, enzymes, and co-factors that make them work so well in nature.

Vitamins constructed in the lab have none of these. They’re stripped-down copies… isolated chemical forms of the real thing.

Meanwhile, it’s tough to know what you’re getting. Many “health” websites will advise you not to take a vitamin if it has a “chemical-sounding name” because it’s probably synthetic.

The problem with that advice is most vitamins themselves have chemical-sounding names.

Vitamin C is called ascorbate. Vitamin D is cholecalciferol. Vitamin B-6 is pyridoxine. Vitamin B-12 has the tongue-twisting chemical name cyanocobalamin. You can’t avoid these – they are your vitamins.

So forget about the chemical-sounding names. Making sure your vitamins are real is much easier than that

Here’s what to do instead:

1. Look for what’s NOT in your vitamin.

Well-made, natural vitamins leave out things like sugar, yeast, salt, gluten and artificial colors and preservatives.

Remember though, that vitamins do need some kind of filler to physically keep the pill from falling apart. That means there will often be some kind of cellulose or stearate in them. But don’t worry, they’re harmless.

2. Look for the letters d and l.

You can clearly tell the difference between synthetic and natural forms of vitamins when you shine a simple beam of polarized light on them.

A natural vitamin will bend all the light to the right because of the way the molecules spin together in nature. 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.

But if you send that same beam of light through a synthetic vitamin, it will bend both ways. Half to the right, and half to the left. The Latin for left is “levo.” Put that together with “dextro” and you have the “dl" you often see on labels at the beginning of a synthetic vitamin’s name.

The best example is vitamin E. There’s plenty of evidence your body uses the natural form – d-alpha tocopherol – much better than the synthetic dl-alpha tocopherol.

Like the study done last year that found that the natural form had significantly higher antioxidant effect.¹ And in an animal study, the natural form was absorbed much better. 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

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.

Sources

1 Colombo ML. "An update on vitamin E, tocopherol and tocotrienol-perspectives." Molecules, Mar 2010;15(4):2103-13.
2 H. Yang et. al. "Effect of vitamin E source, natural versus synthetic." J. Anim Sci. 2009. 87:4057-4063.