Are you flushing your vitamins down the toilet?

The people who clean those portable toilets know the truth about vitamin and mineral pills. Many of them report seeing the remains of partially digested vitamin and mineral capsules at the bottom of porta-potties, some with the name of the pill maker still on them! Do you think the people who took those vitamins realize that they literally flushed their vitamin pills and money down the toilet?

Of the millions of nutritional supplements available on the market today, how do you know that the one you are using is worth the money you are spending on it? New technology can help you get the most out of your vitamin and mineral supplement purchase.

There are 3 ways to judge if your vitamin and mineral supplement is worth the money you are spending on it: the quality of the raw materials, how well your body absorbs it, and the ORAC score.

First of all, your nutritional supplement must be made with quality raw materials. The only FDA requirement for supplements is that they contain at least a trace of the vitamin, mineral, or herb listed on the label. If your supplement is really cheap, you may want to research how much of the ingredient you want is in it. Many discount vitamin manufacturers will only use a small leaf per bottle of supplement with fillers added to make it look good.

Second, the Physician’s Desk reference says that only 10% of the nutrients in traditional vitamin and mineral pills and capsules are absorbed by your body. It must be digested first to be in a form that your body can use. Liquid nutritional supplements are an improvement over pills and capsules, but they also cannot be fully absorbed by the body because they also go through the digestive process. The nutrients are not in a small enough form to be absorbed by the body, but they are better than pills and capsules.

Third, the ORAC score can indicate whether your nutritional supplement is strong enough to do what it says it will. ORAC stands for Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity. It is a “definitive test to assess the antioxidant strength of potential antioxidant compounds.” Therefore, the higher the ORAC score, the higher the antioxidant capacity of the compound. To give you an example of this, fresh fruits and vegetables have been given an ORAC score of 800. That means they are capable of providing a strong antioxidant effect on the free radicals your body produces.

Eating fruits and vegetables with a high ORAC score may aid the aging process in the human body and brain, according to studies conducted at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University in Boston. Whole-food vitamins give you the nutrition found in food plus the convenience of being able to get everything you need in one serving.

When it comes to vitamins and minerals, you really do get what you pay for. Research your choice in vitamin and mineral supplements to ensure that the ones you choose are of the highest quality and fully absorbable by your body.