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Q: Are your vendor’s supplements whole Foods?
Here is a response from our vendor’s research department.
A: While some companies label their products as "whole food supplements," this has no legal definition, and has therefore been used quite loosely by marketers of dietary supplements. While it is the intention of some marketers to lead consumers to believe that nutritional products can be made by condensing or compressing whole foods into efficacious, nutritional tidbits, such a result is impossible. (1 Vitamin and Mineral Safety. Council for Responsible Nutrition. 1997. Pg. 5.)
Consider that a supplement condensed or compressed from a whole food would contain little nutrient value, and would require taking an inordinately large number of servings or tablets to get even one serving with adequate nutritional value. Take spinach, for example. If we consider a reasonable serving size for spinach to be one cup of cooked spinach, the spinach in that serving would weigh approximately 180 grams. Dried and made into a powder, it would weigh about 30 grams. Since a normal-sized tablet holds about a half gram of powder, at best to get the equivalent of a cup of cooked spinach, you would need to consume a minimum of 60 tablets.
When you think about it, anything not fresh off the plant, tree, or vine is less than natural because something must happen between the time raw ingredients are harvested and put into an end product that provides benefit for the consumer. So a good working definition of "natural" would be "as close to nature as possible with the least amount of processing needed to deliver claimed nutrients." We are committed to providing the purest and most bio-available nutrients derived from naturally occurring sources whenever possible. Our founder once said, "True, no one can improve upon nature’s nutrition, but we can improve upon the methods used by man to capture nature’s values." Accordingly, while our vendor seeks to use the finest natural sources for its formulations, we also recognize the beneficial advances in food technology that make available highly bio-potent nutrient sources where nature has not provided them.
Perhaps a more important issue for consumers than going back and forth on the meaning of such terms as "natural" and "whole foods," might be the scientific basis and actual nutritional value of food and nutritional supplements. We are proud that our vendor's products are based on sound science and bring benefits to our consumers. It is where our vendor distinguishes itself from competitors. When appropriate, they conduct clinical studies to ensure product safety and support efficacy. Their studies have been published in peer-reviewed scientific and medical journals, such as The New England Journal of Medicine, The Journal of the American Medical Association, The American Journal of Cardiology and others. These journals are available in publicand medical libraries across the nation. Suffice it to say, our aim is to provide the best products of their kind, and we believe we do a good job of that. If you have evidence that a competitor does a better job, we’d be interested in seeing supporting data.
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