Wholefood V Synthetic supplements.
So, what’s the difference? Basically, food-based supplements are derived from a whole-food source, while synthetic supplements are synthesized in a laboratory and not necessarily derived from a food-source. So, a company that makes whole-food nutrients will take fruits, vegetables, grains, etc. and concentrate a portion (say the vitamin C) of the food into a tablet. The final product winds up being a concentrate of a food with a specific amount of a certain nutrient, after the fiber, carbohydrate, protein, etc. is removed. Now, there is one more distinction necessary to make. A supplement can be derived from a food-source, but the ingredient(s) can still be isolated to contain only certain compounds from that food.
Let’s take vitamin C for example. Vitamin C is a whole complex which contains ascorbic acid, bioflavanoids (including “p”, “j”, and “k” factors), tyrosinase, and ascorbigen. As you can see, ascorbic acid is only one portion of the entire vitamin C complex. However, the industry decided that (only) ascorbic acid is necessary to be present in order to say a supplement contains “vitamin C”. Therefore, most supplements that claim to be vitamin C, only contain ascorbic acid. However, whole-food based supplements include the entire vitamin C complex in addition to the ascorbic acid. So the point is that a supplement may be naturally derived from food, but still not be a “whole-food complex”. For example, the “vitamin C” in a supplement may originally be had from cherries (a food which contains the entire vitamin C complex), but the supplement still only contains ascorbic acid (again, lacking the bioflavanoids, tyrosinase, ascorbigen, etc.) because that’s the only portion they wanted to isolate.
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