Vitamins: Which Are Natural, Which Are Synthetic?

The following information has been gathered and compiled through personal experience, while traveling, teaching classes that include T'ai Chi, Qi Gong, herbal information, martial arts and other health related subjects. The article also contains feedback from students and anecdotal information from readers of my columns. The following are my opinions and deductions from those sources.

The majority of vitamins sold in this country are synthetic, made in a lab from chemicals and sometimes questionable material. This has become more and more the case since most pharmaceutical companies have gotten into the vitamin and mineral marketplace.

No vitamin occurs by itself naturally. In nature, vitamin C has bioflavonoids included in some part of the parent plant or substance. Bioflavonoids are necessary for vitamin C to be assimilated. On the other hand, many synthetics contain substances that aren't included in the natural product. Many natural substance also contain various vitamins and mineral that do compete for the same receptor sites, but they are bound up in the plant's matrix in a way that causes them to be time released and not available to the body at the same time as the other vitamins or minerals. Processing or fractionating a plant or whole food, and then using the parts separately as opposed to the whole plant or in the natural complex original form, can cause the same competitive receptor site problems as making the items synthetically and combining them in one supplement. Calcium and magnesium are one example. Calcium and magnesium complete for the same cellular receptor site. if taken together, as synthetics or broken down through processing and mixed together, only a portion of either will get to, and be assimilated at, the cellular level. The following is only an example: if you're taking 1000 mg of calcium and 500 mg of magnesium in the same supplement, you may be getting only 100 mg of calcium and 50 mg of magnesium. Taken separately and four hours apart, you're much more likely to be getting what you had intended to get.