There is Sugar in Some Multivitamins!

What's in your multivitamin? They can be incredibly incomplete and/or contain sugar and other unnecessary ingredients.

Do you take a multivitamin?

Someone recently sent me a link to a recording by Dr. Joel Wallach called Dead Doctors Don’t Lie. In the audio he talks about how we should be able to live well beyond 100 years old and that most natural, old-age deaths are still untimely. They are actually caused by a vitamin or mineral deficiency.

I don’t know about you, but if I can squeeze out another 30 healthy, active years beyond the national average I’d like to know more.

Nutritional Deficiency

Our diets don’t contain the nutritional variety that they used to. There are a variety of reasons for that, two of which are very significant.

We used to be nomadic, hunter-gatherer people (many thousands of years ago, before farming) and we ate what we could find as we traveled. That gave diversity to our diets, which gave us access to a wide variety of nutrients. A lot of that diversity went away when we learned how to domesticate plants and establish farms. Since then we eat mostly the same things every day, which limits the nutrients that we get from our diet.

The second reason is much more recent. Large industrial farms have depleted the nutrients from the soil. And if the nutrients aren’t in the soil then the plants we used to depend on for those nutrients won’t have them either. Plants can’t pick up what isn’t there.

So our diets now are largely limited in the nutrients that they provide us. And that leads to our current vitamin and mineral deficiencies.

Supplement with a Multivitamin

The easiest solution is to supplement. You can take a nutritional supplement for one nutrient, D3 for example, if you happen to know which one you are lacking in.

More likely you need a multivitamin because you probably don’t know which ones you are deficient in, or even more likely, you are deficient in several, if not most of them.

I eat pretty much the same thing every day so I supplement with a multivitamin. After listening to that recording though, I was curious to see if I could find something more complete than what I was already taking, still for a reasonable price.

The first place I looked was in a nutrition store. I found two multivitamins that looked good. They had a lot of vitamins and minerals plus extra ingredients for one purpose or another, like men’s or women’s specific needs, or heart health.

The downside was that they were a lot more expensive than what I currently pay, but not all that different in their content.

I also went to the Youngevity website and looked at one of their multivitamins. Youngevity is the nutrition company founded by Dr. Wallach. Their multivitamin had two minerals that mine doesn’t have – iron and phosphorus. Mine has manganese which theirs didn’t.

Beyond that, the difference was the same as in the ones at the nutrition store. My multivitamin has additional ingredients that target certain body systems while the others had ingredients for other systems.

And the price was almost twice what I’m currently paying.

The net result is that my current multivitamin looks just as good as the others, but costs less (in some cases a lot less).

Are You Deficient in Sugar?

Finally, just for grins, I decided to see what I could find at Walmart and some local grocery stores. I figured they would be a lot cheaper, and probably not all that complete.

No surprise there.

I didn’t expect the first two items listed in “other ingredients” though. Most of them contained two different forms of sugar – some kind of corn syrup and a regular sugar like sucrose. All of them contained at least one form of sugar.

I did not know that sugar was a nutrient that most people were lacking in.

They are essentially expensive bottles of candy. No thanks!

Trace Minerals

I also read about supplementing with trace minerals. There are a lot more minerals in nature, that used to be in our food as we wandered from place to place, than what you can get in a multivitamin.

So I decided to try a trace mineral supplement and see what that does. The bottle recommends adding it to your drinking water, but it didn’t taste all that great. Instead, I add it to a smoothie. The taste, while enough to flavor water, isn’t strong enough to affect the flavor of a smoothie.

I also found a recipe for a remineralizing toothpaste that uses the trace minerals to help strengthen teeth.

The Multivitamin that I Use

Kenzen Mega Daily 4 multivitamin for men and women

If you are familiar with me and this website then you shouldn’t be surprised to learn that I use Nikken’s Mega Daily 4 multivitamin.

Yes, I am a distributor and I do earn a commission for every bottle bought through links from this website (unless you are already a customer through another distributor).

Since we are talking about health though, I sincerely wanted to know how Mega Daily 4 stood up against the other multivitamins out there. And it looks pretty good to me, and at a comparable or better price.

So I’m sticking with my monthly auto-shipment of Kenzen Mega Daily 4.

Your Turn

Do you take a multivitamin? And have you looked at the ingredients? Does it contain sugar?

Thanks for reading. Tell me what you like or dislike about your multivitamin in a comment below, and please share this with your followers on social media.

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2 Responses to There is Sugar in Some Multivitamins!

  1. James says:

    Personally and professionally speaking, I find that many multivitamins just aren’t worth it. The average person isn’t sure what they are taking and often the doses are a tiny bit too small to do much good (focussing on daily requirement statistics rather than the functional doses that the best research talks about). A tiny bit of sugar itself therefore isn’t the worst thing ever, especially if you are taking a balanced diet. BUT, ensuring you’re actually getting the supplements you need (absorbing it as well as ingesting it) is the key (This may need some professional guidance if you ever get stuck!) The other thing i’ve noticed on many multivitamins is that they tend to contain inactive forms of vitamins. This means, simply put, your body has to do some work to activate it before it can be used as intended. Active forms tend to be more expensive and individual (ie: Not a 1 pill solves all circumstance) but tend to give a better result.

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