What We Learned About Multivitamins

There are more than one hundred brands of multivitamins currently marketed in America. Why would we believe yet another one is necessary? The truth is both astonishing and surprising. The search for a great multivitamin was spawned by CFU's customers asking us to recommend a good vitamin to compliment the mineral supplement TrueBlue™. The six month search into existing multivitamin brands resulted in a series of disappointments. The deeper we investigated, the more clear it became that we were not going to find suitable products to recommend.

What They Say is in The Bottle Isn’t in The Bottle

In America, we have not required testing of supplements to be sure that ingredients listed on the bottle are actually there in amounts claimed on the label. In the same way that most coral products sold in the USA are mostly sand (called Marine Coral), vitamin supplements often contain lower amounts or none of the listed ingredients. As an example, the current price of CoQ-10 from raw material manufacturers at this time is $1300 per kg. If your batch requires 100 kg of CoQ-10, that is $130,000 worth of that ingredient and it is really tempting to put less in than the label says and pocket the difference. It happens all the time. An independent Consumer Advocate group, Consumer Lab™, tested 27 of the leading multi-vitamins and found that 1/3 of them failed to contain what they claimed on the label. But that is just the beginning of the challenges we found in our search for a great multi.

The New Anti-Aging Ingredients are Not Included

In the past decade or two there has been a tremendous amount of good science done on a dozen or more “anti-aging” ingredients. You have probably heard the buzz about items like Grape Seed Extract, Carnitine, Alpha Lipoic Acid, Co-Q 10, and a few others, yet they are absent in almost all multi-vitamin formulas. Why? Because they are darn expensive. Many of these ingredients will offer benefits that are at least as important as some of the old standby vitamins, yet they are missing for the formulas.

There is Not Enough of The Expensive Ingredients

Once in a while we did see a multi with the newer anti-aging ingredients, but we were disappointed to see the amounts of each. The common practice is to advertise that the multi “contains CoQ-10, Grape Seed Extract” and one or two other expensive ingredients, so that it looks like a great formula. The only problem is they put in just a few milligrams of each. The industry insiders call it “label fluff” – not enough to make any difference in your body, but it sure fluffs up the label.

Shortcuts on Quality Abound

As in every industry, there are quality components and inferior ones. There is Lipoic Acid for $106 a kg and some for $800 per kg with huge differences in potency and stability. Caplets are often used because they are cheaper to produce than capsules, but the binding agents that hold the ingredients together inhibit absorption. There are several studies which make it clear that caplets are less effective than capsules, yet some of the largest producers of multi’s still use them. Some companies even use synthetic vitamins rather than natural sourced ones.

Single Forms of Ingredients are Used

Our bodies can best utilize vitamins when they are offered in more than one form. For example, most multi’s offer vitamin C as ascorbic acid only, which is water soluble. In fact, a better approach is to offer it in the fat soluble form called Ascorbyl Palmitate in addition to the water soluble form because they both have characteristics which are valuable for our bodies. This same principle is true of Vitamin A, and E, yet few multi’s offer these vitamins in more than one form.

You Pay for All the Middlemen

This last problem with multi’s is probably the root of all the others so pay close attention. This may be shocking, but most of the multi’s on the market only cost about $2.50 to make. After manufacturer mark ups, advertising costs, distributor mark ups, and retail store mark ups (stores normally double their cost on it), you end up paying $15 - $20 for it. In other words distribution and marketing causes the product cost to go up by a factor of 10 times.

Now here’s the rub. To manufacture a multi-vitamin properly, it costs in the neighborhood of $25 instead of $2.50. And at that price it would have to retail at $150 to $200 a bottle to satisfy all the middlemen and advertising! A multi-vitamin at that price would never sell, so companies continue to cut corners… and you keep wondering why you don’t experience many health benefits.

It is impossible for a manufacturer to make a profit on a full strength formula – that is the reason for all the corner cutting mentioned in the first five points! We urge you to do your own checking and see if we are right. Make a few phone calls and you will see that we are not exaggerating one bit.

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