by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
Vitamins and all kinds of health supplements can become useless in as little as a week if they are being stored in kitchens and bathrooms, researchers have warned.
Not that the lobby will have it.
Supplements and vitamins are ruined by high humidity and degrade within days, even if they are stored in pots with their lids on tight, because each and every time that you happen open the lid you let in air, which means oxygen, and moisture and this combination destroys the product.
Within a very short time, so researchers, a week even, you can get complete loss of vitamin C, for instance. In truth most of those ingredients that are in manufactured supplements can be destroyed that fast.
You can get complete loss of the ingredients, so the researchers, though it depends on the conditions and it also depends on the formulation. Something that, as far as I am aware, does not happen if you use herbs as your source and store herbs properly dried, for instance, for infusions.
The findings could be a serious blow to the vitamin and health supplement industry, which is worth about 600 million GBP a year in Britain and that lobby is already doing damage control.
The research shows how vulnerable supplements such as vitamin B and C are to a process called deliquescence.
It means that they are badly affected by humidity, which can reach up to 98percent in a bathroom where, for example, someone has just had a lengthy shower.
Opening and closing a package will change the atmosphere in it. If you open and close the package in a bathroom, you add a little bit of humidity and moisture each time. So a researcher said.
The Health Supplement Information Service denied those claims, saying: “So long as they are stored in ordinary shelves in a bathroom there should not be a problem.”
Now they would say that, wouldn't say, and what are “ordinary shelves”? Manufactured vitamins and supplements are very prone to oxidization, probably caused by the fact of being encased in pill form and such, and under the influence of both light, oxygen and humidity those pills degrade rapidly.
Maybe we should just consider getting our vitamins and such like via proper food and not manufactured “health” supplements. Many of those so-called vitamins and supplements are not needed in the first place and there are also much better options available from whence to obtain vitamins and trace elements than from those manufactured, for that's that many of them are, vitamins and supplements.
© 2010
