How to maximize your body's ability
to absorb the nutrients in your vitamins

If your body is in a condition where it does a very poor job of absorbing the nutrition you consume, then even the best vitamin and mineral supplement product does you very little good.

That is one of the reasons why I'm teaching you all these things about how your body works and how to improve how it functions; so that you can better absorb the nutrition in your food and in your vitamin supplements. Here are some tips on how to increase your body's ability to absorb the nutrients in your vitamins.

First, you want to create as good an environment in your gut as possible so that the friendly bacteria (which are responsible for a large part of your digestion and assimilation) can thrive. Taking a good quality probiotic product that has a combination of lactobacillus, acidophilus and other varieties of friendly bacteria is one of the ways you can improve the state of this friendly bacteria.

A second thing you can do is take digestive enzymes with your meals. This will help you break down the macro nutrition (the food you eat) more completely which will in turn help your body with the absorption of the micro nutrition (vitamins and trace minerals) that you consume.

Another important step to take is make sure your liver is functioning as best it can. I'll be covering how to improve your liver function in detail in future issues of Foundations of Health.

What can happen if you pick the wrong supplement
If the vitamin supplement you are considering doesn't meet the standards I've discussed so far, it can pass right through your body and do you no good at all.

To give you an example of this, I once saw a photo of an x-ray taken of a person's colon area. In this photo I could clearly see two vitamin supplement tablets, still intact, looking like they had just come out of the bottle. These supplement tablets were poorly made, never disintegrated and would soon end up in the toilet.

Photos like these are a graphic illustration of the fact that just because you swallow your vitamin supplement doesn't mean your body is going to be able to use it.

Are you wasting your money on your vitamins?
With this in mind, let's look at this useless, undissolved supplement in the x-ray from another perspective; a financial one. Let's say you find a great deal on a supplement and start taking it. We'll call it Supplement X. Let's also say this Supplement X costs $20 for a sixty day supply.

You think you've found a great deal, but what if it turns out that your Supplement X has been poorly manufactured and is only 10% bio available. What this means is that your body will only be able to use $2 worth of this supplement ($20 times 10%).

But wait a minute. What happened to the other $18 you paid for the supplement? It went right through your body, that's what. Looking at it another way, you paid $20 for your sixty day supplement supply yet ended up completely wasting 90% of that $20 you spent. You literally flushed $18 right down the toilet.

Just like everything else in life, there is no free lunch. When it comes to choosing a supplement, don't be cheap. Do your homework and find a good quality supplement that your body can actually use.

Other factors to consider

Are the health benefit claims being made by the company provable?
Vitamin supplement companies will claim that their product will do certain things or that the way they put their product together or package it will create a particular health benefit. This may be true but the only thing that matters is have they proven it. Are there proven health benefits from taking their supplement? It's important that if this claim is made, it can be backed up by science.

Is the supplement you are considering safe to consume?
Just because the supplement is in a bottle, the bottle has a fancy label and it looks like it comes from a big company doesn't mean the ingredients in the supplement are pure and safe. There can be many harmful substances in that capsule that can have an immediate harmful effect as well as over the long term.

Again don't be cheap. Do your homework, find a good quality vitamin and mineral supplement and ensure that the money you are spending every month on vitamins is not being wasted.

I'll give you some more vitamin and mineral supplement resources later on. For now, consider the fact that not all vitamin and mineral supplements are created equal.

So if you are going to be spending money on them anyway, choose one that has a proven record of actually making it all the way to your cells where your body can put the nutrition to good use.

Till next time,

- Andy Long

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