Ultimate Guide To Vitamin Absorption And Digestion

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There’s a huge problem plaguing most multivitamin and mineral complexes: If you’re lucky, you might absorb 10% or 20% of the pill contents. As one researcher put it, by taking these pills, most of us are just creating “really expensive urine”(1).

Most of us are just taking pills, only waste the vast majority of the contents by passing them through our systems completely undigested. Developing an efficient formula which enhances the absorption of vitamins is then greatly more important than trying to pack as many compounds as possible into one pill.

It takes a carefully formulated solution to solve this problem. Here’s the issue with typical formulations:

The Problem With Vitamin Absorption

When looking at the supplements most of us take, there are several reasons why absorption is such a problem:

  • Pills take too long to break down, passing through your system before nutrients can be absorbed.
  • Complexes use synthetic vitamins and antioxidants, which the body doesn’t know how to work with as efficiently as the natural sources it’s been used to for thousands of years.
  • Supplements don’t take into account which molecules are liposoluble (meaning they require an amount of fat to be absorbed).
  • They also don’t take into consideration synergistic properties of compounds that, when taken together, work hand-in-hand to enhance the absorption of one another.

Sadly, a lot of this boils down to marketing. Most consumers aren’t even aware of the absorption problem behind most vitamin mixtures, so all they really look for is how much of each ingredient is contained in the pill. Since consumers aren’t looking for a high absorption capability, manufacturers aren’t trying to cater to this need.

Unfortunately, the end result is a vitamin that just doesn’t work the way you would expect. Sure, you end up getting a small amount of micronutrients from it, but almost all of the pill essentially goes to waste. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how many exotic ingredients you’re ingesting if none of them are actually being put to use.

Liquid Vitamins: Solving the Absorption Problem

One type of product that has really stood out from the crowd lately are liquid vitamins. Instead of the capsules or pressure packed powders that you’re used to, it’s a liquid product – meaning as soon as you ingest it, it mixes with your stomach contents and goes to work.

This eliminates the problem posed by capsules not breaking down, making it nearly impossible for the ingredients to pass through your digestive tract without being absorbed.

Instead of facing the usual 10% to 20% absorption rate that’s typical of other supplements, liquid vitamins can easily provide up to 98% bioavailability of its ingredients (2). Furthermore, many of the ingredients come from entirely natural, plant-based sources.

These are the types of vitamins and mineral sources that our bodies are used to absorbing from food, put together in the ratios necessary to facilitate absorption. In other words, liquid vitamins are is miles ahead of the traditional supplement that comes in pill form.

References:

(1) BBC News – http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/109881.stm

(2) Are Liquid Vitamins Absorbed Better Than Capsules? – http://www.livestrong.com/article/353383-are-liquid-vitamins-absorbed-any-better-than-pill-vitamins/

 

Vincent John