Review: Pure Synergy and Vita Synergy food-based vitamins and supplements

Thursday, September 10, 2009 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: Pure Synergy, health news, Natural News

(NaturalNews) Yesterday, I wrote a story about the potential dangers of titanium dioxide, a chemical excipient used in many low-grade vitamins and supplements. Following that story, many people wrote me, asking, "Is there a vitamin that's completely free of excipients and fillers?"

As it turns out, there is. It's a line of 100% food-based vitamins that contain no fillers, excipients, binders or flow agents. This makes it unique in the industry, and it's one of the reasons why, for the past several months, I've made this vitamin my No. 1 choice for food-based vitamins. It's called Vita Synergy and it's from The Synergy Company in Moab, Utah.

The Vita Synergy product is superb. There is no vitamin I've ever found, anywhere in the world, that's superior to Vita Synergy. It is 100% based on whole foods, many of the ingredients are organic, and it has absolutely no stearates (like magnesium stearate), no fillers, no binders, no lubricants and no pharmaceutical glaze (like many vitamin tablets are made with).

What this means is that Vita Synergy delivers nutrition to your body in a format that's innately recognized by your body! Many low-grade vitamin products on the market today are little more than a hodge-podge of toxic synthetic chemicals hyped up to sound like they're good for you. But Vita Synergy is completely different. Instead of chemically isolating nutrients and then combining them into a vitamin, it concentrates real foods, combines those, and then calculates the resulting vitamin nutrition that appears naturally in those whole foods.

This approach sounds revolutionary, but it really isn't: It's the way the human body has been interacting with foods throughout human history. What's revolutionary here is the wisdom of Mitchell May (http://www.mitchellmay.com/pages/home.html) in departing from the status quo of the supplement industry and recognizing that nature makes more nutritious food than a laboratory.

If you believe in synthetic chemicals and man-made vitamins made with titanium dioxide, sodium benzoate and artificial colors, buy Centrum vitamins. But if you believe in the healing power of Mother Nature and the inherent wisdom of food-based supplements, buy Vita Synergy. You are what you eat, and I'd rather be made out of real food than synthetic chemicals.

No binders, excipients or lubricants

Many consumers -- even health-conscious ones -- aren't aware of just how many binders, fillers, excipients and lubricants are used in the nutritional supplements industry. These elements aren't just added for fun; they have a real purpose. Some are designed to make the vitamin tablet "stick" together. Others are designed to help the powders flow more freely through the vitamin-making machinery. Polishes and glazes are designed to make vitamin tablets look more "polished" (literally) and easier to swallow.

The choice of such binders, fillers, excipients and lubricants tells you a lot about the quality of the vitamin manufacturer. Some companies use titanium dioxide and artificial colors to make their tablets look "painted." Others, like Vitacost.com, refuse to use titanium dioxide in their in-house brands.

New Chapter, one of my top-recommended sources for high-quality supplements, uses silica as a binder. That's probably the best choice for a natural binder, and it has a nutritional benefit to boot. But The Synergy Company takes the winning ticket with its unique approach that's 100% free of all binders, excipients, fillers, etc.

How does it accomplish this? The short answer is that it costs more money to manufacture vitamins without the use of binders and excipients. The ingredients can't be pushed through the manufacturing equipment as quickly, and the machinery requires more frequent cleaning (which slows production). Also, without fillers, the vitamin tablet must be made 100% out of the listed ingredients (instead of filler). Some vitamins and minerals in the natural health industry are made from as much as 95% filler and only 5% active ingredient. Filler provides a cheap way for some manufacturers to create a large-looking pill even though it only delivers a very small amount of active ingredient. (The No. 1 ingredient in many Centrum formulas, for example, is calcium carbonate, which can be cheaply made from ground up sea shells.)

Manufacturing a vitamin without the typical binders, excipients and fillers is costly. But it's the only way to deliver high-density nutrition without all these extra elements.

The jury is out, of course, on the safety of the long-term use binders, excipients, fillers and lubricants. Vitamin companies that use such ingredients aggressively defend their use as safe, often citing the FDA as their source for determining the safety of such ingredients. (Because the FDA cares about your health, didn't you know?...) Yet holistic nutritionists and food purists fall back on the commonsense idea that nutrition probably shouldn't include elements that aren't part of the food supply in the natural world.

In other words, when you pick an apple off a tree, it's not coated with paraffin wax like the apples in the grocery store. When you eat berries off a bush, they aren't preserved with sodium benzoate or enhanced with artificial coloring chemicals. When you eat medicinal herbs out of the garden, they aren't compacted into tiny tablet shapes that are glued together with chemical binders. In the real world, food doesn't need binders and excipients. That's why it's so exciting to find a concentrated food source, in tablet form, that provides all the benefits of high-density nutrition without any of the binders, fillers or excipients that don't technically belong in our food.

It's worth mentioning, by the way, that I personally still take many supplements made with natural binders. New Chapter products are a good example of that: I'm not concerned about a little silica or corn starch. I don't mind flow agents if they're natural and the body can recognize them as food. There are lots of high-quality supplements available today that still use small amounts of stearates, silica or other such ingredients. But for those who want the purest nutritional supplements made today, Vita Synergy simply can't be beat. It's expensive but worth every penny.

We don't earn anything on the sales of Pure Synery products, by the way. This is a 100% independent recommendation based on my knowledge and experience with the Vita Synergy product. I've also read the history of Mitchell May and learned a lot about this company over the last few months. They're the real deal, and they deserve your business.

They also make a powdered superfood product called Pure Synergy. I've been recommending that product for years. It's a hard-core, nutrient-dense superfood that's among the best in the world. It's not for superfood beginners, however, as the taste takes some getting used to. If you're a superfood beginner, blend it with Delicious Greens or Emerald Balance to enhance the taste.

This is why the Vita Synergy vitamins are so convenient: They contain many of the same ingredients as Pure Synergy, but you can just swallow them (and you don't have to drink a liquid). Of course, for hard-core nutrition fans like myself, we LIKE tasting the nutrition as we drink it, but that's definitely an acquired taste.

In any case, if you're looking for the very best food-based vitamin / supplement in the world, look no further: Vita Synergy is what you've been waiting for. In the world of vitamins made from real food, it doesn't get any better than Vita Synergy.

Learn more at the Pure Synergy website:
http://thesynergycompany.com/pages/vita-syne...

Additional sources for this story:
Centrum ingredients:
http://centrum.com/productdetail.aspx?BrandP...