Are food based supplements better?

Is this supplement any good?

I have an acquaintance who doesn’t buy our supplements, but loves to ask me for nutrition advice by sending photos of the latest cheap supplement they’ve bought, saying ‘is this one any good?’

Obviously I really love to provide this service 😆.The silver lining is I get to analyse other products being peddled and explain to you where the ingredients or marketing gimmicks are lacking!

So based on a recent ‘is this any good’ submission, this week I’ll discuss:

should nutrition supplements contain wholefoods?

 

Multivitamin with Fruit & Vegetables

For this analysis we have a multivitamin that I’ll call ‘Multi X’ that as well as a basic multi (B vits, minerals etc) contains:

• 26 fruit and vegetable powders
• greens blend (spirula, alfalfa etc)

It costs around £25.I’ll compare it to Pollution Protection which is:

• a multivitamin plus antioxidants
• doesn’t have these fruit, veg & green powders

It costs £34.95.

The wholefood product might sound better, based on all those extra ingredients right?

Let’s break it down:

1. You cannot fit a worthwhile amount of the food powders into a tiny capsule.

- In Multi X the total content of fruit, veg, & greens is 80 milligrams.

- In an organic green powder e.g. Naturya brand, the recommended serving is >10 GRAMS.

So, 80mg doesn’t touch the sides.

In my opinion, the food powders waste space, where in Pollution Protection we add premium antioxidants in a meaningful dose.

2. Pollution Protection has:

- 50mg of Alpha Lipoic Acid

- 30mg of CoQ10

Which is much better value for money than Multi X’s 80mg food powder.

3. But is the wholefood product more ‘natural’?

- No; it still contains isolated nutrients like B Vitamins, Vitamin C, and minerals. What matters is whether the isolated nutrients are in a chemically natural form, which is often not the case in cheap supplements.

- Take your Pollution Protection multivitamin with breakfast/lunch and you absorb it perfectly. You’re better off adding a proper dose of organic green powder in juice on the side rather than a miniscule amount in the capsule.

4. Isolated supplemental nutrients come in many forms, which vary widely in quality.

Multi X contains cheap forms of B Vitamins which your body has to convert to the active form. Whereas in Pollution Protection you get premium, active forms of B Vitamins.

Multi X also uses Magnesium Oxide, a cheap and ineffective ingredient used in lower quality supplements!

Some of the ways Pollution Protection helps you:

 

🔋Energy

🦴 Bone maintenance

💅 Skin, hair & nails

😷 Immune health

🩸 Hormonal regulation 

🧘 Stress support

🌱 This multivitamin is great for vegans, having the best form of Vitamin B12 as well as Vegan D3.

♻️ Aluminium packaging is endlessly recyclable, very energy efficient to recycle, and lightweight, so has a lower transport footprint.

Plastic is not endlessly recyclable and glass is heavy, having a higher transport footprint

 

Premium nutrition ingredients you don’t get in lesser multivitamins

• CoQ10 - used by your mitochondria to make energy. Declines with age, highly recommended for those using statins, which reduce CoQ10 in the body.

• Alpha Lipoic Acid - enhances the power of other antioxidants, helps blood sugar control.

• N-Acetyl-Cysteine (NAC) - allows us to make an extremely important antioxidant, glutathione, itself poorly absorbed in supplement form.

  The addition of these ingredients make Pollution Protection excellent value for money.

Magnesium in multivitamins

Multivitamins never have enough magnesium, you can’t physically fit a good amount in; nutritionists commonly recommend a separate magnesium supplement as we suffer depletion due to stress.

So, I highly recommend trying:

🔋Pollution Protection in the morning,

💤 Vital Minerals Magnesium or Night Support in the evening.

 

Thanks for reading! Let me know if you have any questions- hello@citysurvivor.co.uk

Daisy

Nutritional Therapist and founder of City Survivor