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.

by law, Supplements are foods and must conform to the definition of a food. Some supplements claim to be food based, plant based or food form etc. A supplement at its best can provide the building blocks of food, a temporary pathway to help people get on track and make the most out of their diet.

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 a 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 combine reliably, remaining stable for perhaps 2 years. 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 (Millionths of a gram per capsule) they cannot be reliably measured or evenly mixed within each capsule or tablet. 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 their way feely into the mix, without getting stuck on the way through the process of manufacture and digestion! They are used as a coating to a tablet, making it easier to swallow.

It’s also important not to just consider additives as a negative, amongst the many important roles an additive can play they actually make a supplement more “foodlike”, not less. Without them, any complex of vitamins and minerals is just an uncontrolled mix of isolated pharmaceuticals, Some nutrients in supplements such as Iron and Magnesium, can irritate the digestive tract if not protected by buffering additives.

When we eat any food, we are not just eating the nutrients it supplies but we’re also taking in an enormous array of substances that make up the plant or animal material from which that food is derived, much of which we simply excrete as being indigestible.

With food supplements an industrial process isolates and concentrates the nutrients we are looking to supplement. Their integrity then needs to be protected from oxidation and humidity. Without such protection, oxidized vitamins can have an anti-nutritive effect. Additives are an essential component of any food supplement

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 do not list the full breakdown of compound ingredients, which is often considered a loophole to food labelling regulations and making some appear more natural. In these products, the carriers to herbal extracts or vitamins, such as 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 and reliable, but importantly, are also active. Using the right additives ensures this. We have prepared a short document to help you identify what we use and why.