Nature & Nurture Healthcare Pvt. Ltd.

Naturaceuticals

	Beta carotene
	Fungicides for food
	Lycopene
	Natural vitamins g. Anti obesity compound
	Alkoloids

Why Natural Vitamins?

All of us are much more conscious of our health today. We watch what we eat, exercise, keep fats down, or at the very least, take vitamin supplements. They're plentiful and cheap and you can get them at your local grocery store. Practically everything in the grocery store is enriched with vitamins anyway, so we shouldn't be missing a thing. But if we're taking such great care of our health, why are degenerative diseases occurring at an alarming rate and fertility rates falling drastically?

The vitamin phenomenon started after the turn of the century during the beginning of the industrial revolution. Science found ways to create molecular duplicates or copies of vitamins occurring in nature. Most vitamins can now be synthesized and are made from substances ranging from corn syrup to coal tar.

These synthesized duplicates differ from natural vitamins in two essential ways. First, the molecular polarity of the substance has changed, rendering it a "mirror image" of the original molecule. Dr. Royal Lee, founder of Standard Process, discovered this mirror image attribute of vitamins while studying light refraction the 1930's. While this may seem like a minor issue, it is not. The body continues to look for the shape of the original molecule, and the man-made substance becomes a burden to be excreted rather than a help to healing.

Second, each vitamin occurring in nature comes in a complex form easily assimilable by the human body. Take vitamin C for example. Naturally occurring in citrus fruits, acerola cherries, rose hips and other fruits and vegetables, this vitamin comes in a package containing vitamin P factors such as bioflavonoids and rutin, vitamin K, vitamin J, various enzymes and coenzymes plus a small amount of ascorbic acid, the antioxidant of the complex. Vitamin C is rated according to the amount of ascorbic acid it contains. Ascorbic acid is not vitamin C, ascorbic acid is ascorbic acid, a fraction of the biologically utilizable natural vitamin C complex. Furthermore, most ascorbic acid on the market is produced synthetically.

In a study conducted by Dr. Victor Herbert, professor of medicine at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, and published in The New York Times, it was found that rather than reduce free radicals which lead to cell damage, synthetic C supplements promoted free radical generation. "The vitamin C supplements mobilizes harmless ferric iron stored in the body and converts it to harmful ferrous iron, which induces damage to the heart and other organs. Unlike the vitamin C naturally present in foods like orange juice, ascorbic acid as a vitamin C supplement is not an antioxidant, it's a redox agent - an antioxidant in some circumstances and a pro-oxidant in others," said Dr. Herbert.

According to The New York Times, reporting on an another study, a team of British pathologists at the University of Leicester studied 30 healthy men and women for six weeks, giving them 400 milligrams of vitamin C daily in the form of ascorbic acid. They found that at this level, vitamin C promoted damage to the DNA in these individuals.

Synthetic B vitamins have performed similarly. Writing in a Pennsylvania newspaper, a medical columnist who had been medical officer in a North Korean prisoner-of-war camp during the Korean conflict, found his fellow prisoners contracting Beriberi, a disease caused by a deficiency of Vitamin B. He obtained Thiamine Hydrochloride, a synthetic form of vitamin B, from the Red Cross, and administered it to the sickest men. No positive change was seen and the men continued to get worse. The guards suggested rice polish, a natural source of vitamin B, which he administered in small amounts. The Beriberi symptoms abated within a week.

Vitamin E is another example. The Atlanta Journal and Constitution summarized the April, 1997 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences with a headline proclaiming "Megadoses of E May Be Harmful, A Study Indicates." The story discussed that individuals taking vitamin E supplements might be depleting their bodies of other forms of the vitamin that perform unique and vital chemical tasks. The author mentions that vitamin E supplements were administered in the form of alpha-tocopherol. Alpha-tocopherol is one of seven tocopherols, the antioxidants of the vitamin E complex, but it is not the active ingredient. Natural vitamin E contains seven tocopherols plus polyunsaturated fatty acids, vitamins F, A and K and forms of vitamin D and manganese. The body is designed to utilize food in its whole form. If incomplete foods such as refined alpha-tocopherol are digested, the missing factors are borrowed from tissue reserves in order to make the partial food usable.

In a Spring 1994 Finnish study published in the New England Journal of Medicine synthetic vitamin E was supplied by a major pharmaceutical company. In the study, users of the product had a statistically significant loss of protection from lung cancer, stroke and other degenerative diseases.

The list goes on and on. From sterility, to reduced life span, to poorer fur in animals, to malnutrition, synthetic vitamins are being found not only unhelpful, but downright damaging. Living beings need the whole, natural vitamin complex. This is what we were designed for, what we expect, and what we will respond to. When the body can get vitamins in the form it expects - in its entirety, including all trace minerals, enzymes and other factors - much less is required to achieve results.

To determine whether vitamins are synthetic or natural, read the label. If the ingredients sound more chemical in nature, the supplement is probably synthetic. If they sound more like food, it is usually natural. If the potency is expressed in neat round numbers like 100 mg, 200 mg or 400IU, it is probably synthetic. Nature is rarely that neat.