Hi P.L.,
I’m a Senior Scientist at Nutrilite, and my comments here do not necessarily reflect those of my employer. I wanted to comment on an older post for which commenting was closed. It was a review of Nutrilite DOUBLE X, but my comments are also germane to this post about natural vitamins.I was struck by several things in your review of Double X and the comments it elicited over the almost two years since you first posted it. Much of the discussion revolves around your gauge of quality, which is whether a given multivitamin is “natural” or not. You are correct in stating that Double X is not all-natural. It contains both natural and synthetic nutrients. (But your listing of the Supplement Facts for Double X omits over half the ingredients actually listed.) Distributors who claim it is all-natural are betraying their misunderstanding of their own product and undermining their own as well as the brand’s credibility. I suspect that that’s where the confusion comes from – there’s so much talk about phytonutrients and plant concentrates in Double X that people assume it must be entirely made of plants. We use both natural and synthetic ingredients for several reasons, including cost, nutrient content, and manufacturability. An all-natural multisupplement, such as one you recommend elsewhere on your website, would provide very low levels of several essential nutrients. For example, I calculated that with the all-natural supplement that gets your thumbs up, the maximum dosage of nine tablets a day provides only 15 mcg of folic acid. The Daily Value for folic acid is 400 mcg. An “all-natural” supplement thus does a poor job of actually supplementing the diet with useful amounts of any nutrients – providing in this case less than 5% of the minimum amount of folate needed every day to stave off a deficiency disease. And so on for every nutrient in an “all-natural” multi: they’re there at such low levels you’d have to a meal of them to get a reasonable amount. And that’s just my point: there’s nothing wrong with “all-natural” vitamins and minerals. Here the best recommendation is: walk down to your local grocery store or farmer’s market and get yourself some fresh fruits and vegetables; better yet, supplement your diet with fruits and vegetables you grow yourself. But in some cases – opinions vary; for instance, you have apparently stopped taking Double X along with any other supplements – it is necessary to supplement even a very healthy diet in order to support optimal health goals rather than just avoid deficiency disease.
Don’t confuse the “natural” vs. “synthetic” issue with other questions such as contamination or heat-treatment during processing. It’s not true that “synthetic” vitamins are more prone to contamination with aluminium or anything else. On the contrary, quality control is much more demanding for a natural vitamin than for a synthetic. To paraphrase Gary Reineccius from his excellent article in Scientific American on the mistaken but commonly held belief that “natural flavors” are inherently better than synthetic flavors, Nature has no restrictions on using toxic chemicals, whereas the synthetic chemist does. Also, synthetic vitamins are not heat-treated; it’s plant concentrates that often must be gently heated to dehydrate them and reduce bulk and improve stability.
In your own list of recommended minerals you mention several synthetic forms (no proprietary chelated minerals would be considered natural, since they are manufactured in a laboratory), so your own definition of “natural” is unclear. Behind this whole confused and confusing notion of “natural” lies, in my opinion, an entirely legitimate worry, or quest: a worry that by popping pills down our throats we might be harming ourselves; and a quest for healthy living filled with vitality and energy. At Nutrilite we take the responsibility of making supplements that people take into their bodies seriously. “Natural” does not mean safe and pure any more than “synthetic” does. In either case – whether we’re working with synthetic or natural vitamins or natural plant concentrates – we have multiple quality controls in place that are unrivaled in the industry. You discount any information about our quality control available from Nutrilite or Amway, but Nutrilite products did pass the quality checks run by the independent ConsumerLabs.com, who also found that Nutrilite came out on top in a brand survey of consumer satisfaction.
As you know, Double X contains both natural and synthetic nutrients. For example, vitamin C is listed on the label as coming from both ascorbic acid (synthetic) and acerola (natural). It contains all-natural vitamin E (from d-Alpha Tocopheryl succinate), which is 1.4 times as bioavailable as synthetic vitamin E. It also contains synthetic folic acid, which is 1.6 times as bioavailable as natural folate. For vitamins and minerals the choice was made on a case-by-case basis to go for natural or synthetic form. To my mind, there are two key points of differentiation for Double X compared to other high-end multisupplements: (1) the quality control, from seed to finished product, and (2) the variety of plant concentrates. On top of this, it also provides high, optimal-health-supporting levels of vitamins and minerals.
With the latest generation of Double X (in the US and many other countries around the world), the formula contains plant concentrates from apple, rosemary, sage, and blueberry among many others – all of these were based from multi-stage bioassay screening designed (to simplify a little) around a single concept: variety. Variety is an intuitively healthy concept – we get that a healthy diet doesn’t mean high chronic consumption of any single healthy food. The very mental image of a healthy plateful features many different textures and colors: variety, because different plants provide different things are bodies need to stay healthy.
Focusing here on the plant ingredients, Double X has three kinds of variety built-in: (1) variety of ingredients; it doesn’t contain, say, high amounts of just two or three plant ingredients; it contains more than twenty. (2) Next, it also provides variety of action, meaning action in the body (as verified by bioassays, and also based on different phytonutrient class or family). Double X is not, for example, super-powered with “just” antioxidant power with an eye-popping ORAC number; rather, along with high antioxidant potency and a high ORAC number, it also provides different kinds of benefits; it provides bioassay-supported action against five types of free radicals; we’ve also included ingredients that are help the body detoxify itself or help protect and repair DNA, functions which have nothing or little to do with just antioxidant potential. (3) Finally, in Double X there’s also variety within individual plant ingredients. Take the acerola, for example: we could have aimed to produce a super-pure, super-concentrated acerola extract that provides only the single molecule ascorbic acid; instead, we like a rather “impure” natural acerola extract, that contains high amounts of ascorbic acid (vitamin C), along with a preponderance of other naturally-occuring flavonoids found in the fresh fruit. This is the “whole food” philosophy at the level of individual ingredients. Though in some cases plant concentrates provide highly-concentrated specific nutrients, none of these are so concentrated that they are completely divorced from the whole food they were extraced from; lutein, for example, extracted from marigold flowers, also contains other mixed carotenoids like zeaxanthin found in the whole fresh plant. Thus with those three kinds of variety is Double X meant to complement a healthy diet that is, yes, based on natural, unprocessed foods as far as possible. Double X is an examplar of the “Best of Nature. Best of Science” philosophy.
It’s interesting that you start out your review of Double X by stating that you felt more energetic, or rather less energetic after you stopped. It’s something we hear a lot and something I feel too. “Optimal health” is a bit of an abstract concept and some supplements are taken on faith and hope – for example, I take supplements for my eyes (lutein and others) because of the scientific evidence – no hard proof, but associations between high consumptions of lutein in the diet and risk of macular degeneration. I don’t feel my eyesight getting stronger, though. With a supplement like Double X, it can be a little different – it doesn’t have to be only on faith. Many people do feel noticeably better when they take it, or, like you, only notice a difference when they stop.
Cheers,
Marc Lemay,
[email protected]
