Choosing supplements and vitamins: Natural or synthetic versions?
Are your supplements and vitamins natural or synthetic?
If you’re consciously working on your health, you’re probably a regular on various supplement websites. You might even take supplements for specific indications on the advice of a medical professional.
These days we practically have to take supplements because essential nutrients are missing from our diet, despite the abundance of food. Quality isn’t what it used to be—soils are depleted and food processing can reduce the amount of almost every vitamin.
Can dietary supplements address the gaps in our nutrition? What’s really in many of these supplements, and are there differences?
These are good questions that can only be answered by going back to basics—are the ingredients natural or man-made (synthetic)? You rarely hear discussions about the synthetic nature of supplements. Perhaps you’ve always assumed the nutrients in high-quality supplements were sourced from natural foods. The vitamin C (ascorbic acid) you’ve taken for years must come from oranges or other whole-food sources—and is surely a form the body absorbs well.
Natural versus synthetic vitamins and supplements
There’s a big difference between the nutrients in natural foods and the ingredients used in most supplements. Take a carrot, for example.
Carrots are packed with nutrients. They contain not only important compounds like the vitamin-A precursor beta-carotene or vitamin C, but also lesser-known compounds such as folate and mannose. Scientists have identified about 200 different nutrients and phytonutrients in the humble carrot.
These 200 nutrients work together in mysterious ways, with simple and complex interactions. Foods contain enzymes, coenzymes, co-vitamins, minerals, and other compounds that help create natural synergy.
It’s nearly impossible to figure this out completely or to replicate it. Scientists therefore don’t know exactly how it all works—and likely never will. Another example of the mystery, subtlety, and complexity of Mother Nature.
Now look at a typical multivitamin formula. Most consumers are satisfied when they see twenty different ingredients on the label—ideally all at 100% of the daily value. Impressive, right? Now think back to that carrot with over 200 nutrients. Exactly. The composition of natural food is complex. All the components in the carrot need each other to be well absorbed and used by our bodies.
The prevailing “more-is-better” idea doesn’t always hold. If beta-carotene is good for the eyes, then a huge amount must be even better—right? That’s not how Mother Nature or the body works when it comes to nutrition.
Whole foods are full of balanced nutrients. Natural concentrates therefore often show a much lower potency when expressed in milligrams or micrograms. The quick conclusion is that they’re less effective or powerful—based purely on the amounts of isolated vitamins.
Because vitamins are part of food complexes, it isn’t that simple. They must be combined with their natural helpers to be properly used by the body. In other words, a tiny amount of a vitamin in its natural food environment is often more functional, potent, and nourishing than a large amount of a man-made, pure vitamin fraction*.
With food, “more” is certainly not always better.
Quality over quantity
The moral of the story: Nature’s nutrients are perfectly proportioned. Natural products often have more effect than high doses of synthetic compositions.
Mother Nature knows best—not only for nutrition, but also for biorhythms and movement. Nutrients need each other to be effective in our body. The “big players” need their helpers just as much as the other way around. Most vitamin isolates, without their small partners—cofactors—are simply less effective.
How to tell if your supplements are synthetic
Simple… check the label. The ingredients tell you everything you need. If a food source is listed—e.g., fruits, herbs, cod liver oil, brewer’s yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae), or palm oil—you’re likely fine. If only chemical names appear, such as niacin, thiamine, or tocopherols, the product contains synthetic ingredients.
For supplements intended for general use, it’s often safer to trust your intuition and follow Hippocrates: “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.”
Is there a role for man-made ingredients?
You don’t need to be a genius to understand that foods fortified with vitamins don’t act the same as the original, unprocessed foods. Vitamins as part of natural food complexes simply work better—even though you often hear the body can’t tell the difference. That’s not quite true, because this view:
- ignores the effects of different vitamin structures on absorption and utilization,
- ignores size differences among various isomers, which directly impact absorption and bioactivity,
- overlooks that the natural food matrix of vitamins improves absorption, bioactivity, and efficacy,
- overlooks that most man-made vitamins have a crystalline structure, unlike natural variants.
In this article we’re not dismissing the wide range of positive effects of man-made nutrients on general health or specific indications. The goal is to raise consumer awareness that there are differences between natural and synthetic nutrients.
When there’s a choice, natural products should, in our view, always be preferred for general use. For specific indications, this isn’t always feasible. Using (even higher) doses of man-made nutrients or ingredients may then be the right choice. Again, we encourage readers to consider the complexity of health-relevant issues. Mother Nature always knows best!
