People who clean out those portable toilets know the truth about vitamin and mineral pills. Many of them report seeing the remnants of partially digested vitamin and mineral capsules at the bottom of the porta-potties, some with the name of the pill manufacturer still on them! Do you think the people who took those vitamins realize they have literally flushed their vitamin pills and money down the toilet?

Out of the millions of nutritional supplements available on the market today, how do you know that the one you are using is worth the money you are spending on it? New technology can help you make the most of your vitamin and mineral supplement purchase.

There are 3 ways to judge if your vitamin and mineral supplement is worth the money you are spending on it: the quality of the raw materials, how well your body absorbs it and the ORAC score.

First, your nutritional supplement must be produced with quality raw materials. The only requirement FDA places on supplements is that it contain at least a trace of the vitamin, mineral or herb that is named on the label. If your supplement is really cheap, you might want to investigate how much of the ingredient you want is in there. Many discount vitamin makers will just use one little leaf per bottle of supplement with fillers added to make it look good.

Second, the Physician’s Desk reference says that only 10% of the nutrients in traditional vitamin and mineral pills and capsules are absorbed by your body. It must be digested first to be in a form that your body can use. Liquid nutritional supplements are an improvement over pills and capsules but they can’t be completely absorbed by the body either because they go through the digestive process as well. The nutrients are not in a small enough form to be absorbed by the body but they are better than pills and capsules.

Third, the ORAC score can tell if your nutritional supplement is strong enough to do what it says it will do. ORAC stands for Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity. It is a “definitive test for assessing the anti-oxidant strength of potential antioxidant compounds.” So, the higher the ORAC score, the stronger the antioxidant capability of the compound. To give you an example of this, fresh fruits and vegetables were given an ORAC score of 800. That means they are capable of delivering a strong antioxidant effect on the free radicals that produced by your body.

Eating fruits and vegetables with a high ORAC score may help the aging process in the human body and brain, according to studies done at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition research Center on Aging at Tufts University in Boston. Whole food vitamins give you the nutrition found in food plus the convenience of being able to get all you need with just one dose.

When it comes to vitamins and minerals, you really do get what you pay for. Investigate your choice in vitamin and mineral supplements to make sure that the one you choose are of the highest quality and completely absorbable by your body.