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Natural Versus Synthetic or Crystalline Vitamins
Published by Vitamin Products Company, July 31, 1952. Includes attached articles from Science and British Medical Journal.
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Most people realize that there is a vast difference between natural and synthetic products, but fail to recognize that it is impossible to separately identify and list on a label all the parts of a natural product.
To clarify the point, assume that you wanted to have all your separate food elements like fats, carbohydrates, proteins and minerals separately purified and put up in chemically assayable form. What would it cost to eat in that case? What about all the unknown factors that would be thrown away in the rejected “impurities” that might later be found necessary to life?
To judge a natural complex in the light of pure chemicals is just absurd. Natural complexes of the various vitamins are to be considered as functional mechanisms the oxidation-reduction enzyme system of which ascorbic acid is a part, or the various enzyme systems that form the complicated vitamin B and G complexes in nature, must be considered as much of a mechanism as a watch, and to chemically analyze a watch to determine its ability to keep time would be as reasonable as to remove the ascorbic acid from the vitamin C complex and call it the “vitamin C.”
The value of a watch will be established by its ability to keep accurate time. Natural fats contain some unknown factor in addition to vitamin A that also controls and prevents the reactions of vitamin A deficiency. (Proc. Soc. Exp. Biol. & Med. vol. 75, p.322, 1950).
The value of a natural vitamin B complex will be demonstrated by its ability to correct the arrhythmias of the heart as shown by any cardiograph five minutes after the administration of a potent form of the vitamin. Severe damage to the heart was found in human beri-beri cases, confirmed by animal tests. (Tr. Am. Physicians, vol. 51, p.341, 1936).
The value of natural vitamin C complex is demonstrated by its ability to promote phagocytic activity, by its ability to hour by hour lower the temperature of a fever patient with an infection. It is easy to check, far easier than to separate the brass of the watch and get its weight in milligrams. The value of a natural vitamin P complex is demonstrable by its ability to stop gingival hemorrhage (“pink toothbrush”) overnight.
The value of a natural fraction of the vitamin E complex (E2) will be demonstrated by its ability to wipe out cardiac pains in angina pectoris as efficiently but far more permanently than nitroglycerine.
Some naive individuals often become imbued with the notion that they can build a watch by weighing and dumping together a prescribed quantity of brass, iron, sapphires, gold and glass. Or that they can concoct a vitamin complex that will function as well as a natural product as found in foods by the same “prescription” method.
The attached reports on careful tests made on both animal and human subjects tell the story of the dismal failure of such idiotic ideas. In spite of such failures, there continues to be an apparently inexhaustible procession of gullible buyers of synthetic vitamins and “enriched” foods.
These poor deluded victims do not know that double the daily requirement of crystalling or synthetic thiamin has caused the castration of offspring of test animals fed such mild overdoses. (See Jol. of Nutrition, 18, 2:192-193, 1939, Barnett Sure).
They do not know that the nutritional action of a vitamin complex may be very different from the drug effect of a heavier dosage of one of its separate components.
The effects of natural sugar cane juice is to build teeth and protect them from destruction. The effect of refined sugar is the opposite. White sugar has been shown to attack tooth enamel, whole raw unrefined sugar protects tooth enamel. (See The Vitamins in Medicine by Bicknell & Prescott (1946) page 688.) “The protective substance present in unrefined food has not yet been isolated, but its action is not dependent on any change of acidity in the saliva. It explains the puzzling observations that dental decay may be absent in the mouths of native children whose teeth are always coated in sticky sugar from eating raw sugar cane all day (104).”
There is the same difference between vitamin complexes and the pure crystalling or synthetic product. The refined food industry and the synthetic chemical industries have so warped scientific thought that these ideas are considered heretical, and unorthodox by the famed “consensus of opinion” of the medical hierarchy that can excommunicate any physician who dares to accept his own findings of facts in connection with foods and vitamins.
No wonder that a medical education has been defined as “The warping of unsuspecting immature minds into a meticulous system of commercial superstition.”