Mmmmmmm....coal tar!

Have you had your coal tar today?  No?  If you took your multivitamin today, chances are you did!  Yay!!!

I'm starting to realize that I am pretty ignorant about my supplements.  I'd like to think I'm not alone.  Let's face it, it's almost cliché to think of a daily multivitamin as "insurance" against a sub-par diet, and of course, every American diet is sub-par, right?  Even if you think you eat a healthy diet, can you really be sure you're getting all of your Vitamin D3, zinc, or molybdenum?  And let's not forget coal tar!

How many of you knew that vitamins fall under one of six categories?  I didn't.  All vitamin supplements can be classified as "strictly synthetic," "nature-identical synthetic," "natural source," "food cultured," "food based," or "bacterial fermentation."  Not surprisingly, most vitamin supplements are either strictly synthetic or nature-identical synthetic, both of which are synonymous for "made in a lab."  The key difference between strictly synthetic and nature-identical synthetic is something called optical activity.  Optical activity is a technical term that refers to the shape of the molecular chain that comprises a particular vitamin.  While a synthetic vitamin might have the same chemical composition as the real deal, it's shape might not conform with a form that is compatible with the enzymes our bodies use to process it.  Therefore, since the optical activity of strictly synthetic vitamins differs from natural or even nature-identical synthetic vitamins, the bioavailability of strictly synthetic vitamins is lower than other forms.

But just because a vitamin is nature-identical doesn't mean it's all that great for us.  As you probably know, most Vitamin C supplements are comprised of ascorbic acid.  Guess where we get ascorbic acid from?  Oranges?  No.  Coal tar?  No, but I'm getting to that.  Corn!  That's right, ascorbic acid is typically derived chemically from corn/rice starch or corn sugar.

Coal tar is where we synthetically get Vitamin B-1 (thiamin).  Hydrochloric acid, the strongest of acids, is added to coal tar to cause it to precipitate.  The precipitant is collected and processed to create thiamin.  Yum!

The point here is that, just like I haven't given any thought to to my insurance coverages and deductibles (and probably should), I've never given any thought to my diet "insurance" until now.  We've always known that honest-to-goodness whole food is far superior to anything we can get out of a bottle, but maybe it's time we started to really look into the bottle.  Maybe we'll start to see that, not only are supplemental vitimans NOT a reasonable substitute for the vitamins and minerals we don't get due to our poor diets, but we'll start to see that they're light-years apart.

(BTW: if you're interested in reading about this topic in depth, check out the article All About Where Our Vitamin Supplements Come From.  I credit all of the information I wrote in this post to Ryan Andrews, who authored this article.  Any errors are my own.)

Now it's time to figure out if I should lower my deductibles!