Are Bionutri Supplements Natural?
Supplements have huge potential, they can bring about a stark change in someone’s experience of health, by providing simple, well constituted nutrition in an easily digestible form. Supplements can support some of the most sensitive individuals. Whilst there are many advantages to using supplements, before taking any, some things should be understood.
Supplements are not food. Some supplements claim to be food based, plant based or food form etc. A supplement is not a food, at its best, it can provide the building blocks of food, providing a temporary pathway to help people get back on track and start getting the most out of their diet once more.
No supplement is natural. Whilst some supplement companies put themselves forward as making “Natural Supplements”, this is a hard to justify, given that no supplement could be manufactured at home in your kitchen. There would be little point in taking a tiny portion of food, chopping it up and popping it in a capsule. Supplements provide active compounds found in food that are isolated, concentrated, sometimes fermented and stabilised to ensure their activity. This process involves very sophisticated technology and can provide extraordinary results but it is not a natural process.
All supplements contain additives. To ensure nutrition’s vital elements are available, reliable and active, additives are used for a wide variety of functions. Additives are often bound to each ingredient (known as a compound ingredient) and also added to the wider blend of every supplement helping the ingredients sit together, preventing caking. These additives have a number of other functions too:
Disintegrants ensure a tablet or capsule you have taken actually breaks down in the digestive environment rather than passing straight through and ending up in the toilet!
Diluents act as an inert carrier to an ingredient. Some active ingredients, like Vitamin D, come in such tiny quantities they cannot be reliably measured or even seen with the human eye. Adding them to a diluent allows accurate dosing of the active ingredient.
Lubricants are one of the most important additives to supplements, they ensure the active ingredients make there way feely into the mix, not getting stuck to machinery on the way. They can also be used as a coating to a tablet, making it easier to swallow.
Bionutri uses additives in their products which are carefully and considerately chosen, only using an excipient where it supports its performance. But most importantly, if an ingredient is in a Bionutri product, we list it on our label. As a brand, trusted by healthcare professionals throughout the UK and across the EU, we pride ourselves on our transparency, upholding our statutory obligations as well as ethical ones. Many manufacturers of food supplements in the UK do not list their compound ingredients, which is often considered a loophole to food labelling and making some appear more natural. In these products, the carriers to herbal extracts or vitamins, like Maltodextrin or sucrose, often go unlisted. We believe, if it’s in there, no matter how small the amount, we should list it.
The role of an additive is often overlooked or undervalued. Of course we want our products be as natural as possible, but we all have high expectations of what a supplement can do for us. It cannot be all things to all people, regardless of what the marketing people tell us. Our primary goal is to ensure Bionutri products are both safe, reliable and active. Using the right additives ensures that. We have prepared a short document to help you identify what we use and why.