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The RAW Truth about Multivitamins
by Jordan Rubin Imagine it's 100 years ago and you are telling friends about a new movement in natural health - "raw" food. These natural living foods are UNCOOKED, UNTREATED, and UNADULTERATED. Your friends are staring at you, confused. You've just described the fresh fruits, salads, vegetables, nuts, and seeds that they eat every day. How things have changed in a century. While today's agriculture and its use of pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, and chemical fertilizers have significantly incr-eased crop yields, fruits and vegetables maintain only a fraction of their nutritive value. A comparison of USDA food composition tables from the 1960s to present day reveals a 25 to 50% decline in vitamin and mineral content. Then, in the name of convenience, safety, and marketing, our food is subjected to further compromise with processes like preserving, irradiating, heating, and treating, which change the nature of the food, robbing it further of the healthful qualities that nourish our bodies. This is the price of paying more attention to the marketing of food than the preservation of its nutrition. Common sense is beginning to prevail thanks to the real food message, the organic movement, and the ever-growing raw food phenomenon. But does a diet rich in real, organic, and raw foods eliminate the need for a multivitamin? Not exactly. Raw foods aren't as nutritious as they once were and may actually be missing entire key nutrients due to poor growing conditions and lack of soil fertility. Fortunately, the Vitamin Code™, a breakthrough discovery in living nutrient development from Garden of Life, is now available and changing the way we take vitamins. The RAW Factor When consumed, raw foods offer vitamins, minerals, enzymes, probiotics, and phytonutrients in their most potent form. Heating foods can reduce many of these important co-factors. Add chemical treatments and preservatives and you are often left with food that is a shell of its former self. While most readily accept this now, who among us would argue that eating a canned, pasteurized fruit cup in syrup is better than eating a raw, organic apple? Also, raw foods, as found in nature, provide the complete package of vitamins, minerals, and co-factors necessary for the body to maximize nutrient potential. Our bodies were designed to take in food and then break it down in order to absorb the nutrition. Co-factors, such as enzymes, naturally present in raw foods allow the body to break down the food and assimilate the nutrients into the bloodstream. Taking supplements can't compare to the benefits associated with consuming raw foods. For those with nutritional deficiencies or who don't eat a healthy, balanced diet, however, a supplement may be necessary to make up the nutritional difference. The Vitamin Code are multivitamins that were developed to provide vitamins and minerals intrinsically linked to their necessary co-factors. Multivitamin in the RAW Creating a multivitamin that is truly raw is a vexing proposition. How do you create a comprehensive dietary supplement without using high heat, excess processing, fillers, or binders? Endre "Andy" Szalay, a Hungarian-born pharmacist and researcher, devoted over two decades to perfecting the process that would become known as the Vitamin Code and lead to the creation of Raw Food-Created Nutrients™. With a strong background in biology from studying pharmacy at university, Andy knew that when a plant takes root, it reaches into the soil and pulls out its inherent inorganic mineral salts. Add sunlight and the plantÕs leaves and fruit produce vitamins and minerals through its metabolic process, meaning these nutrients are literally grown within the plant. Andy wanted to mimic the process using inorganic vitamins and minerals and growing them within a simple, plant-like food in a laboratory setting. He started with what he considered to be the perfect single-cell organism, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, or baker's yeast. The tricky part was finding a way to add an elemental vitamin or mineral to the baker's yeast and actually create it. His first attempts failed. Then he hit upon the idea of adding various peptides to the inorganic nutrients before introducing them to the yeast. His idea paid off. The peptides allowed the vitamins and minerals to pass through the cell walls and unite with the yeast. Unique endogenous co-factors, such as glycoproteins, enzymes, and antioxidants - inherent beneficial by-products of the yeast's life cycle - make up these vitamin and mineral matrices. As it turns out though, there was no "one size fits all" peptide for nutrients. Each vitamin and mineral has a unique peptide partner. It took years, but Andy ascertained the correct peptide for each vitamin and mineral. Then, Andy repeated the whole process above, only this time he used the probiotic, Lactobacillus bulgaricus, instead of yeast. Andy knew that by using a different growing medium, he could utilize a wider array of endogenous co-factors. By growing each batch separately and then combining them after the growing process was complete, the widest possible array of co-factors was achieved, resulting in extreme nutrient synergy. These nutrients, created in various organisms, have another huge benefit. Since they are not cooked, treated, or adulterated, they are indeed raw, making them a true innovation in vitamins and minerals. All Vitamin Code formulas are in "UltraZorbe" vegetarian capsules in a two-cap, twice daily dosage. In addition to standard vitamins and minerals, they all contain a RAW organic fruit and vegetable blend, RAW enzymes and probiotic blend, and RAW Antioxidant and Immune Support Complex. Vitamin Code Family is a multi designed for adults, teens, and children over 6 years old and contains 2 mg iron, 1000 IU vitamin D, and 400 mcg folic acid. Vitamin Code Men contains no iron and 15 mg of zinc, and Vitamin Code Women formula contains 1000 IU vitamin D, 800 mcg folic acid, 8 mg iron, and 10 mg zinc. When I became aware of the raw food-created vitamins and minerals created by Andy, I recognized their uncooked, untreated, unadulterated, and live enzymes and probiotic-containing benefits. I'm confident that the Raw Food-Created Nutrients in the Vitamin Code multivitamins represent the next breakthrough in nutritional supplementation with the extreme nutrient synergy you won't find in any other product. Not only do these multivitamins impart the wisdom of nature, but the Vitamin Code formulations bring the health principles of the past, while taking full advantage of the technology of today. |
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