How To Choose Your Supplements…
Because We Care About Your Quality of Life…
Identify What It Is You Really Need
- Nutrients tend to work together synergistically; more than one is usually needed.
- Always take appropriate amounts in correct proportion to one another.
- Most common nutrient needs are multi-vitamin, multi-mineral, antioxidants, flora and enzymes.
Ensure That Your Supplementation is Really Supplying Your Body Nutrients
- Look for supplements in capsule form. Tablets often use binding agents and have a protective coating which makes absorption difficult and may render them ineffective.
- Avoid supplments that boast big numbers and advertise large amounts (milligrams) of nutrients. Quality of nutrients, such as whole food vitamins, and plant enzymes, are more important than the number of milligrams.
- Look for supplments that ensure cellular delivery. If a nutrient cannot reach the affected or malnourished area, it’s practically worthless.
How Do I Choose a Vitamin Supplment?
- Look for 100% natural whole food vitamins.
How Do I Choose a Mineral Supplment?
- Look for Albion amino acid chelated minerals. Albion Labs is the only company that holds the patent on the amino acid chelation process.
How Do I Choose an Antioxidant Supplment?
- Look for an antioxidant that contains more
than one nutrient, e.g. pine bark or grape seed extract, chelated antioxidant minerals and whole food antioxidants.
- Look for an SOD Precursor System.
How Do I Choose a Probiotic Supplement?
Look for a high-quality stabilized probiotic that does the following:
- Contains at least eight different strains of good
bacteria (ideal is 12). Includes Lactobacillus acidophilus, L. bulgaricus,
L. brevis, L. lactis, L reuteri and Bifidobacterium longum on the label.
- • Displays whole food FOS on the label, e.g. Jerusalem Artichoke.
- • Comes in capsule or powder rather than tablet form.
How Do I Choose an Enzyme Supplement?
Supplemental enzymes should:
- Be specifically created for oral consumption.
- Include all necessary vitamins, minerals
and co-enzymes.
- Be supplied as plant-based food enzymes rather than animal enzymes.
- Include the full spectrum of enzymes necessary to break foods down completely.
How to Choose Your Supplement
Store shelves are flooded with an endless variety of supplements: single herbs, herbal combinations, individual vitamins, “complete” multivitamins, minerals, and ultra trace minerals.
So how do you choose? This can be answered in two simple statements. Choose a supplement that will:
1) supply only the nutrients your body needs and
2) supply the nutrients in a form that can be used by the cells of your body. A supplement is of no use to you if the cells of your body can’t use it. Follow the guidelines below and you should have no trouble choosing the supplement that will give you the best results and provide you with the highest quality ingredients that can be used by your body.
1. Be sure it is something the body needs.
Always ask yourself, “Do I really need this?” These needs should be met by a low dose, natural whole-food supplement containing the correct balance of nutrients. Although each nutrient has its own specific function in the body, nutrients tend to work together synergistically. They help one another. And because nutrients work together, they need to be taken in a balanced formula, not just in isolation. You should take appropriate amounts in correct proportion to one another to get the most out of them. It is rare for an individual to need a single-nutrient supplement or a supplement that contains stimulants, hormones or hormone precursors. Under normal circumstances, the body should be able to make adequate amounts of hormones when provided with adequate nutrition.
If the supplement contains high doses of only one nutrient, stimulants (caffeine, ephedra, guarana, or ma huang), hormones (e.g. growth hormone, testosterone, estrogen, progesterone) or hormone precursors (androsteinedione), you probably don’t need it. The most common needs are multi-vitamin, multi-mineral, antioxidants, flora and enzymes.
2. Be sure the supplement supplies nutrients that the body can use.
This means the ingredients of the supplement must be both absorbable and useable. A supplement is of no use to you if the cells of your body can’t use it. Use the following guidelines to ensure that the supplement will be absorbed and used by the body.
- Look for supplements in capsule form. The nutrients in capsules are more available to the body than tablets. Tablets often have binding agents and a protective coating added, which make it difficult for the body to absorb the nutrients. Even if the tablet dissolves, the nutrients in the tablet are often inactive. The processing techniques used to put nutrients into tablet form require extreme temperatures and/or pressures to compress the ingredients, which destroy the vitamins, enzymes and food complexes rendering them useless to the body. Capsules are created under much mild
- Don’t play the milligram game. It makes no difference how much of a nutrient is contained in a supplement if it isn’t absorbed and if it isn’t in a form that can be used by the body. Avoid supplements that play the numbers game and advertise large amounts
(milligrams) of nutrients. Guaranteeing the ingredients are available to the cells of the body is more important than how much of a nutrient is listed on a supplement label. A rock contains large amounts (in milligrams) of a variety of minerals, but those minerals are not available for use by the body if you eat the rock. To be sure the nutrients in your supplement are in a usable form, choose whole food vitamins, amino acid chelated minerals, plant enzymes and stabilized probiotics.
(See details below).
- Look for supplements that ensure cellular
delivery. Cellular delivery is the key to true nutrition. If a nutrient cannot reach the cells that need it, it is useless. To achieve cellular delivery, a nutrient delivery system must be included as part of the supplement. An effective nutrient delivery system will include the specific enzymes that are required for a nutrient to be absorbed and delivered to the cells of the body. The delivery system should also include the necessary nutrient cofactors and minerals required for those enzymes to function optimally. Look for phrases such as “guaranteed nutrient delivery” , “guaranteed cellular delivery” , or “assured cellular delivery” on the label.
How Do I Choose a Vitamin Supplment?
Look for 100% natural whole food vitamins. Whole food vitamins are absorbed, used and affect the body just as natural foods would. Whole foods and whole food complexes are entire composites, not fractions of vitamins. Synthetic or fractionated vitamins are only fragments of the whole vitamin. For example, alpha-tocopherol is only one part of the vitamin E family; it is missing gamma-tocopherol, and the other tocopherols and tocotrienols, which make up a complete vitamin E.
Fractionating, or pulling apart the constituents that make up a food changes that food into a non-food. These non-food fractions are often unrecognizable to the body, and some can actually create drug-like reactions. In many cases, these fractions can do more harm than good, because they are missing some of their components or cofactors required to function properly in the body. Because these nutrient cofactors are usually missing from a supplement, most supplements will actually “rob” the body of the nutrient cofactors required for proper functioning, which deprives you of the nutrient factors you already had in storage! These nutrients could have been used to repair damaged cells, make new cells, prevent disease and provide you with the energy you need to feel and look younger.
Besides being only fragments of the whole vitamin, many synthetic vitamins were never part of a food at all. Synthetic vitamins are often created chemically from carbon sources such as coal tar. Look for names of foods you recognize such as green pepper, orange peel, rose hips, acerola cherry, alfalfa, or wild yam rather than chemical names of nutrients such as pantothenic acid, thiamin mononitrate, pyridoxine hydrochloride, calcium pantothenate, ascorbic acid or pteroylglutamic acid. All labels of truly NATURAL food concentrate supplements should indicate the exact food source from which the vitamin is obtained.
How to Choose a Mineral Supplement
Look for Albion amino acid chelated minerals. Amino acid chelated minerals are more bioavailable than any other type of mineral. Bioavailability refers to how available a mineral element is for use in the body. Here is where mineral supplements vary widely. While some supplements have a high trace mineral content, those minerals are not “chelated” and so are not absorbable and useable in the body. Through chelation, an amino acid claws onto, or binds to, a mineral. This enables that mineral to be absorbed through the gut wall. Albion Laboratories is the only company that holds a patent on this process. There are other chelation processes and companies claiming to use chelated minerals. However, only the chelation process used by Albion Laboratories is effective. It is the only process that involves bonding an amino acid to a mineral in the same way nature does it and is the only way to produce this natural amino acid-mineral complex. You can recognize chelated minerals by their suffix (chelate, chelazome or chelavite) on the label rather than terms such as oxide, chloride, acetate, sulfate or carbonate.
How to Choose an Antioxidant Supplement
Look for a complete antioxidant. A complete antioxidant will contain more than one antioxidant nutrient. The most common antioxidants are vitamin C, vitamin E, beta-carotene and selenium. These single nutrients have excellent antioxidant properties, but taken alone they are not nearly as effective as when taken together or when combined with other more powerful antioxidants such as pine bark and grape seed extract. Interestingly, the body already contains the most potent and powerful antioxidant available: super oxide dismutase (SOD). Because SOD is destroyed in the digestive system, it cannot be absorbed if taken orally. However, research has shown that providing the precursor nutrients (copper, zinc and manganese) that form the “building blocks” of SOD in the correct ratios, the body can produce even more of its own SOD. SOD is up to 100 times more powerful than any current single antioxidant known to man. A truly complete antioxidant will contain a combination of pine bark and/or grape seed extract, chelated antioxidant minerals, whole food antioxidant vitamins and a SOD Precursor System (copper, zinc and manganese).
How to Choose a Probiotic Supplement
Look for a high-quality stabilized probiotic. Probiotics are live microbial food supplements that provide health benefits by improving the intestinal balance of microflora (gut bacteria).
An effective probiotic should:
- Exert a beneficial effect on immunity and digestion. To have the most beneficial effect on health a probiotic supplement should contain at least eight different strains of bacteria (the ideal is twelve or more).
- Be nonpathogenic and nontoxic. To ensure that the bacteria are truly beneficial and not harmful look for the following bacteria listed on the label Lactobacillus acidophilus, L bulgaricus, L brevis, L lactis, L reuteri and Bifodobacterium longum .
(This list is not all inclusive)
- Contain a large number of viable cells. One way to help ensure that a supplement contains a large number of viable cells is to look for whole food fructooligosaccharides (FOS), such as Jerusalem Artichoke. Fructooligosaccharides, more commonly known as FOS, are a class of simple carbohydrates found naturally in certain plants (Jerusalem
artichokes, onions, and bananas) and act as “food” for the bacteria in the probiotic supplement. Be sure that the FOS (Jerusalem artichokes, onions, and bananas) listed on the label is a whole food and not a chemically produced FOS (Fructooligosaccharides), which may have toxic effects.
- Be capable of surviving metabolism in the gut. The probiotic should be in capsule form to help ensure that the bacteria survive the trip through the digestive tract to the colon.
How to Choose an Enzyme Supplement
Look for plant enzymes that are specifically produced for use with foods. All enzyme supplements are not the same.
Supplemental enzymes should:
- Be specifically created for oral consumption. Few companies specifically produce enzymes for oral consumption. Many enzymes on the market may utilize enzymes, which are intended for making cheese, removing stains or some other industrial or processing application. These enzymes should not be used in a supplement because they are not effective at aiding the digestive process and can be potentially harmful to the body.
- Be supplied as plant-based food enzymes. Plant-based enzymes are more effective than animal or pancreatic enzymes. For a couple reasons. First, plant enzymes have a broader pH activity range, which means they can help digest foods and remain active throughout the intestinal tract. Second, they do not interfere with the natural functioning of the body and therefore have no side effects. Enzymes such as pancreatin, trypsin and chymotrypsin are animal/pancreatic enzymes. Avoid enzyme formulas that contain these ingredients. Instead look for formulas which list enzymes such as protease, lipase, amylase and peptidase.
- Include all the necessary co-factors (vitamins, minerals and coenzymes). All the nutrient cofactors (vitamins and minerals) must be present for each enzyme to be fully active and to insure maximum enzyme activity
- Include the full spectrum of enzymes. When choosing a digestive enzyme formula, an additional recommendation applies. Specifically, a digestive enzyme formula should include the full spectrum of enzymes necessary to break down all types of foods completely. To completely break down a food, all the enzymes for each component of the food must be present. This means that a digestive enzyme formula should not only include the major enzymes (e.g. protease, amylase, lipase and cellulase), but the formula should also include the enzymes for the next steps (e.g. peptidase, lactase, glucoamylase and malt diastase).
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