Choosing a healthy vitamin supplement can be almost as tricky as choosing a healthy food. I personally have little respect for the typical vitamins sold in the grocery store. I used them without ever noticing any difference in the way I felt. I have also tested certain brands of herbal supplements against others and found a big difference in the quality. Apparently, my unscientific findings are pretty typical. Consumer Laboratories, a non-profit organization, did random testing on bottled herbs in 1999. At that time, 75% percent of the herbs met product quality standards. However, in 2003, when they repeated the test, only 22% of the products tested met standards. In fact, most contained only one-fifth of the active ingredient that they were supposed to contain.

Besides missing active ingredients, you should consider if a vitamin supplement may make you worse in the long run. A whole-food vitamin supplement is one made of foods that have been concentrated into supplemental form. This provides you with vitamins the way that they exist in nature - with their co-factors intact. Whole-food nutrients also have a lower risk of toxicity.

Imagine with me for a moment that you have a craving for a vegetable egg-white omelet. You go to the grocery store to get some eggs. You see a brand of eggs that are much cheaper than the other brands, so you decide to purchase them. When you get home, you are very perplexed

to find that your 12 eggshells are empty. It is what is supposed to be inside of the shells that you want. By themselves, the eggshells are worthless to you.

On sale or not, you don’t want to pay for empty eggs. You promptly get into your car with your receipt and take the eggshells to the store manager. The manager is adamant that a new law has been passed, which allows empty shells to be labeled eggs and he refuses to give you your money back. Steaming back to your car, you notice a trash can spilling out cartons of the same brand of worthless eggs that you could not use.

Now imagine with me that a few days have passed and you feel a cold coming on. You decide to run to your neighborhood health food store to purchase some vitamin C. You search the isles and then see what looks to be a great buy. Reading the label you find each chewable tablet contains 1000 milligrams of vitamin C (ascorbic acid). This is just what you were wanting, so you purchase the bottle.

Unfortunately, although you don’t realize it, you have just purchased more empty shells. If a vitamin C molecule were big enough for you to see, you would realize that ascorbic acid is not vitamin C. It is the shell of vitamin C that holds all of its vital nutrients together. The ascorbic acid in your bottle isn’t even from an orange. It was made in a laboratory using sulfuric acid and corn syrup. To make matters worse, the government (the FDA) allows the manufacturer to call this fake shell vitamin C.

Your body can’t use the shell by itself, so it goes to the your body’s internal storage units to search for what should be inside the ascorbic acid shell. When it finds the ingredients that make up vitamin C, it combines them with the ascorbic acid. Your body cannot store an unlimited supply of what it needs to bind with the ascorbic acid. The problems start when your storage units no longer contain these vitamin C ingredients. At that point, the ascorbic acid shell becomes worthless and must be thrown into the liver. Your poor liver will become over- taxed by all of the ascorbic acid trash.