How To Choose Your Vitamins

Have you ever noticed the growing vitamin and supplement sections at big box stores or national chain drug stores? The volume is mind boggling, so how do you know which ones to choose.Something to keep in mind with vitamins as with anything else is: you get what you pay for. If you find a 100-capsule fish oil brand for $15 and it’s buy one get one, it’s probably not a quality brand. The truth is many of the vitamins you find on the shelves in the above-mentioned stores do not contain quality ingredients. They contain:

• Minerals that are not naturally available, therefore they are not highly absorbable. Most vitamin makers use chemically stable carbonate, sulfate or oxide forms. These forms of minerals require your body to break these bonds before accessing the needed mineral.
• Cheap fillers that pose as vitamins and minerals. One example of this is magnesium oxide. This is one of those chemically stable forms, not pure magnesium.
• Inexpensive forms of vitamins/minerals.
• Synthetic forms of vitamins rather than naturally occurring forms. Consider this, our bodies evolved to absorb vitamins the way nature presented them to us, not the way a chemical company manufactured it.
• Dyes, artificial ingredients, preservatives or sugars.

If you have questions about which vitamins or supplements to choose, please feel free to schedule some time to talk to me about them.