Whole Food vs. Raw Material Vitamins

This is often a difficult issue because of the conventional perception that whole food supplements can be made from fresh fruits and vegetables and somehow dried and compressed into a tablet. Unfortunately, this is not possible or realistic. A supplement condensed or compressed from a whole food would actually 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 about 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. And that’s for the nutrients in spinach, alone.

Raw Material Vitamins (whole food concentrates) on the other hand are free from pesticides, chemicals, genetically altered compounds, the good ones are made from 100% organic (better than USDA organic- which by law is only 98%), made from pure (natural as possible) materials which are quality tested through a third party and have ingredients that reflect the most recent scientific and technological advances.  Finding a really good raw material vitamin would need to have clinical testing done (when necessary) and have those studies published in a 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.  I personally have only found one vitamin company that meets these standards.