Don't Risk Your Health to the Uncertainty of Synthetic Vitamins Part 2

What are synthetic vitamins? They are an attempt to copy something from nature.

Synthetics are made in a laboratory with base materials that can include coal tar, formaldehyde, petrochemicals, toxic cow livers, fecal mater or ground-up rocks and shells!

The isolate vitamin-wanna-be does not have the complex co-factors that work with naturally occurring vitamins to produce the nutritional effects and proper absorption.  Vitamins are never isolates in nature but synthetics are and they just don’t work the same!

It’s the belief of many researchers that these isolates have little or in some cases no nutritional molecular activity compared to their naturally occurring superior and can actually have a detrimental effect to our bodies.  Let me be clear that I do believe that synthetic vitamins in many cases have some bioactivity and at first can produce the desired effect but the question is if the bioavailability and activity decreases with time and what the long-term detrimental side effects are on the body. When you take synthetic vitamins your body will draw on it’s small reserve of co-factors to deal with the isolate at first and you might feel like they are working but once your body has exhausted these reserves the symptoms of deficiencies and imbalances will return!  Over time synthetics could actually be depleting your body’s nutrients!

Under a microscope synthetics don’t look the same!

-Most synthetic vitamins are crystal form, the naturally occurring vitamins are not and the body has a problem recognizing them and as a result treats them as a foreign substance, excreting them with a major reduction in absorption.

-Another difference is something called Chiral. The vitamin isolates that are produced in the lab many times are the mirror image of the naturally occurring vitamin molecule. The molecule is made up of the same atoms but the structure is different, left-handed or right-handed.  The change in structure makes the molecule act completely different.

To try to illustrate this difference hold your hands out, palms up.  You cannot superimpose your hands over each other because your thumbs are pointing in opposite directions, so the structure is different.

This is a picture from americanhistory.si.edu  

This picture is of mirror molecules (stereoisomers) and another example of how the structure of a molecule can completely change it's activity and the way the body reacts with it.  There are all the same atoms but different structure, one is right-handed and the other is left.  The picture on the left is the molecule found in an orange peel and it is the left-handed version of the molecule Limonene. The picture on the right is the molecule found in a lemon peel and is the right-handed version of Limonene. The change in structure of this molecule makes it smell completely different and so your body perceives these two molecules as being completely different even though they have the exact same atoms.

So for some to say that synthetic mirror image vitamin molecules are the same as naturally occurring vitamin molecules is a bit of a stretch! The bigger questions are how do these mirror synthetic molecules work in our bodies, what is their bioavailability and what are their detrimental side effects?

 

-Encyclopedia of Food Sciences and Nutrition. Caballero B, Trugo L, Finglas P, 2003

-Vitamins are Naturally Found in Food Complexes. Thiel R ANMA Monitor, 1999

-Natural Vitamins are Superior to Synthetic Ones. Medical Hypotheses. Thiel R, 2000

www.foodkills.org/synthetics.html

www.naturalnews.com/036650_synthetic_vitamins_disease_side_effects.html#ixzz2GyNgcE7a

The Insight Team of the Sunday Times of london. Suffer the Children: The Story of Thalidomide. New York: Viking Press,1979.