Are all minerals equal?

[Guest guest]

Hi and everyone,

Do you get better nutritional products by spending more money?? An

interesting question that I don't have the answer to. When I started using

supplements about 28 years ago, I would occasionally go to the drug store and

buy a cheap vitamin E (one of the expensive vitamins), or a cheap B complex.

At that time I found that the cheaper vitamins didn't seem to work as well as

the more expensive one, so I developed a long-lasting prejudice against cheap,

drugstore vitamins.

The situation may be totally different today, but I still purchase the name

brands that I find in the health food store. My nutritionist doctor

prescribes alot of supplements from Bronson, which can be ordered through the

mail and are a pretty good bargain. Both he and I agree that their products

are excellent. My experience with the vitamins from Wal-Mart or Trader Joes

or the drug stores today is zero. They may be good quality or poor. I have

no experience with them.

My problem is that in my mind I am prejudiced against the cheaper products, so

I probably couldn't even give them a fair evaluation now.

I have nearly always taken individual vitamins instead of multiples so that I

could vary the quantities myself and learn what and how much of each vitamin

and mineral I need. Sometimes this has gotten me into trouble, because some

vitamins and minerals need to be taken in balance because taking one can

deplete the body's stores of another. People say that B-1, B-2, B-3, and B-6

can deplete the others if one is taken by itself. I'm not really sure about

this, but I take them together as a B-complex just in case that's true.

I've recently seen that taking individual minerals can produce problems like

that. Zinc and copper should be taken together and I didn't know that 6

months ago. Now I'm wondering what other minerals should be paired.

Somewhere recently I read that manganese and chromium are a pair. I'm not

sure about that but am investigating it.

On the other hand, do the vitamin and mineral manufacturors know how to

balance vitamins and minerals correctly? I used to trust their knowledge, but

I no longer do. I see zinc and copper in multiples in ratios of 30:1 or

worse, when they should be between 7:1 and 10:1. I'm losing my faith in

manufacturors and I intend to find out a lot more about what the optimum

ratios vitamins and minerals should be in.

For many years supplement makers always put iron in multiples and I found

that the iron was disagreed with me so I avoided multiples. Now, years later,

many manufacturors make iron-free multiples for men. Apparently more men than

myself had problems with siderosis, which is an iron accumulation in the liver

and other places that men get.

Lately, after studying copper extensively, I think that women have a much

higher requirement for copper than men do (just as they do for iron). Copper

not only is a part of hemoglobin, but apparently is part of many female and

stress hormones. Females and people under stress need alot more copper, and

females under stress may need huge amounts to prevent problems like

hyperthyroidism.

These are some of the factors that I think about when I select a company to

make these critical supplements that I am basing my health and life on.

That's why I spend more money, often blindly assuming and hoping that the more

expensive companies are putting more effort into quality and formulation.

It's an incredibly difficult job to evaluate these products and determine

what the best value is. I don't know if I would trust anyone else to perform

the evaluation, and I know that I can't do it well either. It's the same

reason you would buy a Mercedes. You don't know what's inside it, but you

trust the company to make a reliable and safe machine. What else can we do

until we gain the expertise ourselves?

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