Dear Friends,
In my last letter, I discussed the reasons to take a multivitamin or other supplements with vitamins. Today we’re going to review what to seek in these products.
Most of the vitamins you see in supplements are synthetic, and made in a lab or factory, and not produced by nature.
As you may know, nature doesn’t produce vitamins that exist in isolation. Plants, for example, contain many other nutrients that help your body absorb and use vitamins.
These supporting nutrients are called nutritional co-factors, or co-nutrients.
This is a key reason why getting vitamins from food is better. You get the co-nutrients along with the vitamins as nature designed.
Not having these supporting co-nutrients is a drawback of taking a multivitamin supplement made with synthetic vitamins.
With TrueMulti, We Took a Different Approach.
We feel that if we’re trying to make up for shortfalls in vitamin intake from food, doesn’t it make sense to have the vitamins in TrueMulti come from actual food or plant sources instead of being synthetically made?
And that’s what you get - the vitamins in TrueMulti are extracted from 6 USDA certified organic plant sources. These are guava fruit, lemon peel, sesbania leaf, amla fruit, holy basil leaf and annatto seed.
Since the vitamins are from these plant extracts, you also get some of the nutritional co-factors that are naturally part of these plants to help your body absorb and best use these vitamins.
We feel this is the closest you can get to replicating vitamin intake from food in a supplement.
Of course we’re not suggesting that you shouldn’t eat a healthy diet, but as I discussed last week, even those who eat well struggle to meet the RDAs for each vitamin every day.
To fill in those nutritional gaps and make sure you’re getting the RDAs of these key vitamins, we think a real whole food multivitamin like TrueMulti is the way to go.
I say “real” because many multivitamins say or suggest that they’re whole food multis, but many of these products are just adding some plant extracts to the synthetically made vitamins. That’s not the same as vitamins actually coming from plants, which is what you get with TrueMulti.
Consider Also Adding These 2 Supplements
If you take TrueMulti and have a little more available to invest in your health, there’s two additional supplements I suggest taking because of the difficulty of getting these vitamins from diet.
The first is the TrueK2D3 supplement, which combines vitamin K2 derived from chick peas and D3 from organic algae.
We don’t include the vitamin K2 in TrueMulti because those who take a blood thinner medication have to be careful about ingesting vitamin K2 – and consult with their physicians.
TrueMulti does provide the Recommended Daily Allowance of 20mcg for vitamin D.
However if you’re like me and that isn’t enough to keep your vitamin D levels in an optimal range, TrueK2D3 gives you more.
We combine D3 and K2 because they work together closely in the body especially for bone, artery, and immune system function (with emerging research indicating potential for supporting brain and cognitive health too).
Most importantly, D3 and K2 help stop calcium from building up in arteries and instead redirect it to bones.
Unfortunately, vitamin K2 is challenging to get from food – as significant amounts are mostly found in fermented foods, which aren’t typically a big part of American diets.
So adding TrueK2D3 to TrueMulti is a nice complementary upgrade.
The Super Vitamin E
The real icing on the cake would be to also add in our TrueE supplement, which we call the Super Vitamin E.
Again TrueMulti does include the regular vitamin E, which is known as alpha-tocopherol.
TrueE also includes 4 other forms of vitamin E, called tocotrienols – which research is finding may be much more powerful antioxidants than alpha tocopherol.
As important, research is showing tocotrienols can offer benefits not seen with alpha tocopherol alone, especially for brain, heart, and liver health.
Like vitamin K2, the tocotrienols are very hard to get in American diets. The tocotrienols in TrueE are sourced from sustainable red palm oil.
My Personalized Approach to Vitamin Supplements
Last, I just want to share how I take these vitamins – which I customized a bit for my personal needs.
First, I do take the last supplements we discussed, which are TrueK2D3 and TrueE.
As mentioned, I do need the extra vitamin D3 to keep my levels where they should be, and I’m a big fan of vitamin K2 and the tocotrienols in TrueE.
That covers my vitamin needs for vitamin D, E and K2, but I still need to address the eight B vitamins and vitamin C.
Instead of taking TrueMulti, I get the B vitamins from our TrueB supplement, which is also a whole food plant-based vitamin supplement.
I do this because in addition to the natural folate from the plant extracts in TrueB, we add 5-methylfolate, which is called active folate, which is what our bodies use.
This matters to me because I’m part of a group of roughly 30% of Americans (also some estimates are higher) that have genetic variant – called a polymorphism – that causes my body to struggle to convert some folates and definitely folic acid (synthetic folate) to 5-methylfolate.
Whether you’re getting folate from food or taking folic acid, your body ultimately needs to convert it to 5-methylfolate to use it. By including 5-methylfolate in TrueB, it assures that folks like me are getting enough 5-methylfolate.
That leaves vitamin C, which is the one vitamin I’m confident that I consistently meet the RDA from diet alone.
Part of the lunch I bring to work every day includes a mixture of strawberries, raspberries, and blackberries all of which are rich sources of vitamin C, and I also include blueberries, which don’t have as much vitamin C, but have plenty of good nutrients like polyphenols.
These berries alone help me get to the RDA, and of course some of the other food I eat contains additional vitamin C too.
So I will sometimes take our TrueC vitamin C supplement (which comes from amla fruit), but it’s not as much of a priority as other vitamins because of the berries I’m consuming daily.
Hopefully, that gives you a sense of how you too can personalize your vitamin intake.
Yours for Good Health,
Carl Pradelli
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