Information Helps

When you're buying mineral supplements, a background of solid information will help you find nutritionally sound products.

Ignorance allows supplement companies to take advantage of consumers. The following guidelines will help you get your money's worth. These guidelines are based on the experience of BALCO Laboratories, Inc., testing and measuring the trace mineral levels of well over 200,000 people and trying to help individuals with depleted or deficient mineral levels bring those levels back within the normal, healthy range. In other words, this information isn't based on theory alone. It's based on 15 years of clinical experience.

Multi-Element Analysis

An understanding of the laboratory's history and activities helps explain how BALCO's lab personnel know what they know. BALCO Laboratories, Inc., was formed about 15 years ago to perform a very specialized medical test called multi-element analysis. Using a device about the size of a small pickup truck known as an inductively-coupled plasma spectrometer, this medical test heats a patient's blood and urine samples to approximately 17,000 degrees. At this temperature, a sample's individual atoms become "excited" and emit energy wavelengths that are then captured, analyzed (each element emits different characteristic wavelengths), and counted by computer. The information emerges in printed form, detailing the amounts in parts per million of the trace minerals and toxic metals present in the sample. Typically, 20 to 30 elements are analyzed at a time, a considerable improvement over using the atomic absorption spectrometer, which can only analyze a single element per "pass."

For athletes or bodybuilders, the most important nutritional elements are zinc, copper, iron, magnesium, and chromium. Toxic metals such as mercury, lead, and aluminum occasionally show up in unhealthily high concentrations, so the levels of these are definitely worth checking, too. Believe it or not, mercury can accumulate in the body if a bodybuilder eats can after can after can of tunafish. Large deepwater fish are located in the food chain in a position that causes an accumulation of the toxic metal. Lead can be caused by industrial exposure or the contamination of soil and paint around older houses. Aluminum can accumulate from a variety of causes. High levels of this in members of a professional basketball team were traced back to an aluminum-based underarm deodorant the players often used.

There is a saying among laboratory specialists that "every sample has its limitations." Some trace minerals concentrate primarily in blood plasma, others in red blood cells. Some toxic metals even concentrate in hair. The more data a specialist has about different compartments (rbc, plasma, whole blood, urine) has, the more accurately one is able to evaluate a patient's trace mineral and toxic metal status.

In addition to having had the trace minerals and toxic metals in blood and urine measured, all BALCO Labs' past 200,000 patients were asked to fill out a comprehensive health questionnaire. By examining information from all these sources, and by knowing how absorption of one trace mineral can affect the absorption of others, some very accurate knowledge can be made concerning a patient's excesses, depletions, deficiencies, and adequacies. Literally thousands of peer-reviewed medical articles support this contention.

Food Versus Supplementation

As the labs' personnel made more and more analyses, testing patients, looking at their levels, and evaluating the results of supplementation, surprising facts became apparent.

When the measurement of trace mineral levels uncovered deficiencies, BALCO's medical director instructed patients to eat foods rich in the trace minerals they required. It quickly became obvious, however, that this usually proved ineffective in eliminating deficiencies. Then patients were instructed to go out, buy, and take therapeutic dosages of trace minerals. Retesting several months later would measure their mineral levels again.

Multi Vitamin-Minerals

Most patients bought multi vitamin-mineral supplements, thinking these would work

After eight to 12 weeks of therapeutic supplementation, however, literally none of them had successfully eliminated deficiencies. In fact, in 15 years of experience with over 200,000 patients, lab personnel have never found a multi-mineral supplement that accomplished this.

Healthy, Depleted or Deficient?

For a moment, let's get a bit technical and define terms precisely. Examine the bell-shaped curve chart below. In the center, you'll find a perpendicular line marked "mean." This is the average score of 100 healthy individuals. "Healthy" people produce a trace mineral measurement in parts per million that falls on either side of this "mean" value, either higher or lower, and within a distance of "one standard deviation." These people encompass the bulk of the population.

When a person's score falls between one and two standard deviations away from the "mean," then, as far as trace minerals are concerned, this is called a "depletion." In technical peer-reviewed medical articles, some specialists such as Ananda S. Prasad, M.D., Ph.D., have called this type of score a "mild deficiency." When, however, the score falls two or more standard deviations away from the "mean," this constitutes a serious "deficiency." These people usually possess one or more overt symptoms of their deficiency. Not being oriented towards nutrition, most physicians usually don't see these. You usually don't see what you don't look for, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't exist.

Experience at BALCO with a huge patient base indicates that multi vitamin-mineral preparations don't change a patient's trace mineral levels. "Multis" may affect vitamin levels—and some peer-reviewed research at other institutions has even brought this into question—but as far as minerals are concerned their only beneficial effect is to enrich supplement manufacturers. The only way in which the mineral content of these preparations may be effective is in maintaining a preexisting level—an effect that might very well be the result food eaten and not the content of the supplement.

Why "Multis" Don't Work

Why, BALCO's personnel wondered, aren't these multi-mineral preparations effective? Here's what they discovered.

Most of the "multis" patients bought were in tablet form. More often than not, tablets, which are compressed with binders and fillers at pressures sometimes as high as 50,000 pounds per square inchm pass right through the body, undissolved. Remember, it doesn't matter how much of a supplement you put in your mouth. What matters is how much of that supplement you actually absorb.

Variable Interactions

At about the same time BALCO's patients were receiving no benefits from "multis," research was being done elsewhere at a number institutions to determine the efficacy of "multis." In one such study, "Vitamin and Mineral Status of Trained Athletes Including the Effects of Supplementation," participating athletes took a multiple vitamin-mineral supplement daily for three months. During this period, the researchers found no significant changes in the blood concentrations of any of the vitamins, minerals, or trace elements measured. The researchers stated that they suspected that variable interactions between the vitamins and minerals prevented these nutrients from being adequately absorbed.

At least five other peer-reviewed studies came to similar conclusions.

You would think that both physicians and people in the supplement industry would have been aware of these findings, but even today most are ignorant of it.

Calcium: The Main Culprit

Calcium has proven to be one of the main culprits that prevents mineral absorption.. When taken together with other minerals, calcium blocks up to 70% of their absorption. (See the chart entitled "Trace Mineral Absorption," which lists minerals that affect each other's absorption.)

In an edition of The Nurse's Handbook some years ago, nurses were instructed that when providing pregnant women with iron supplements, these supplements should be given "with a glass of milk." Five years later, however, someone realized that the calcium in milk inhibited iron absorption. The Nurse's Handbook now suggests the use of orange juice.

To the serious athlete, who is very often low or deficient in one or more trace minerals, the lesson should be very clear. Multi-mineral preparations are usually a waste of money. They do not provide an adequate source of trace mineral nutrition.

Individual Element Supplements

Learning from patient experience that "multis" weren't effective, BALCO personnel began recommending the use of supplements containing individual trace minerals. After a two-month regimen on these, patients still experienced uneven results. For some, mineral levels actually improved. For most, however, they did not. Again, there had to be a reason.

More investigation and research provided still more explanations. Patients were now buying capsules which, unlike tablets, certainly dissolved after being swallowed. But analysis of these capsules' contents using the same ICP spectrometer that measured patients' trace mineral levels revealed something very interesting. The capsules in packages that didn't even mention calcium each proved to contain up to 800 mg of it.. On packages claiming a capsule content of 800 mg of calcium, analysis often revealed up to 1,500 mg.

Zinc supplements provided a fascinating situation. Many contained zinc oxide, a form of zinc with smaller molecules than zinc monomethionine or zinc aspartate, two other forms on the market. A dosage of zinc oxide would scarcely fill a quarter to a half of any capsule. But what customer would buy a partially filled capsule and not feel cheated? To fill these little gelatin containers, manufacturers routinely included a calcium-containing filler, usually calcium di-phosphate or calcium sulfate. The calcium content of the filler was competing for absorption with the zinc—and often winning.

Zinc oxide seemed the zinc form of choice for a very understandable reason. In the cutthroat world of competition, customers are extremely price-sensitive. A cost difference of several cents can spell the difference between a high sales volume and almost none at all.

Using a filler was understandable, but why a calcium-based one? In the supplement industry, nobody questioned this. It had been done for years. It was tradition. Amazingly enough, now, a decade or more after variable interactions between trace minerals have become well-documented, 90% of the trace mineral supplements sold in the United States still contain calcium fillers. It is still the industry standard.

Bioavailability

When patients began purchasing supplements containing no calcium, this, it was thought, would improve their absorption. It did to a certain degree, but even then some patients failed to absorb their therapeutic trace minerals. Their mineral levels seemed "stuck."

More research revealed still another cause for the problem.

It concerned the issue of bioavailability or absorption rates. Some forms of a trace mineral are far more readily absorbed than others. For instance, studies comparing the absorption rate of zinc oxide with that of zinc monomethionine show that zinc monomethionine is about 3.3 times more absorbable than the other. A patient absorbs more from a given amount of the monomethionine than he does from the oxide.

Most supplements, it turned out, are based on forms with low absorption rates. These forms are usually less expensive, but they provide products that are also less effective.

What to Hunt For

A little more investigation in health food stores showed that, among the dozens of brands on the shelves, effective trace mineral supplements are scarce. You have to hunt for what is effective, and to do this you have to know what you're hunting for.

To summarize the above, a good trace mineral supplement should:

1. Come in capsule rather than tablet form.
2. Contain no trace minerals known to compete with each other for absorption.
3. Contain no binder or filler that isn't starch-based.
4. Contain the trace mineral(s) in highly absorbable form(s).

Ninety-five percent of the products in any store don't possess these characteristics. But the ones that do are the ones worth purchasing.