Vitamins, minerals and other nutrients are natural, in that they are naturally occurring in foods. So what's the white pills they sell in different colored bottles, called "vitamins" sold even in health food stores? Good question. Let's look at the Webster Dictionary definition of a "vitamin."
"any of various organic substances that are essential in minute quantities to the nutrition of most animals and some plants, act especially as co-enzymes and precursors of co-enzymes in the regulation of metabolic processes but do not provide energy or serve as building units, and are present in natural foodstuffs or sometimes produced within the body."
Wow. So there is no indication that a vitamin made synthetically is really a vitamin. And what's even worse, chemists in labs can still call their chemical derivations of vitamins "natural"!
So what's my point? When you go seeking out vitamins because your doctor, nutritionist, or chiropractor says you need to load up on vitamin D or you're low on vitamin C, be careful. The labels on most vitamin bottles can be deceiving. I'll give you an example.
You're looking for, let's say, vitamin B6, because your smart nutritionist says you have to take extra when you're on a birth control pill (which is true). You walk into a health food store (first steps are always the hardest) and you see the rows of vitamins of so many different companies. First you think "how can so many different companies sell so many of the same vitamins?" After you get past that little Twilight Zone episode, you start looking for what you were told to get: B6. You pick out the prettiest bottle - the bottle that catches your eye. "Super B6" it says. You spin it around and it says it has vitamin B6 and following that in parentheses is (as Pyridoxine Hydrochloride). You think "that must be another word for B6. Its not. You find an other bottle and they all generally have the same thing - B6 (as Pyridoxine Hydrochloride). Ok, so you have your B6. You pay, and you walk out.
You didn't buy B6.
What you did purchase was an inactive crystalline or synthetic derivative of B6. I will try to explain this without getting into too much biochemistry. First of all, you cannot isolate any nutrient out of it's complex without destroying it, meaning isolated factors cannot functionally be separated from their wholes - that being the food that they came from (that's crystalline). And in labs, high quantities need to be made, so they are constantly creating replicas of the inert material from inert sources (most of the time petroleum-based products, that's synthetic). Synthetic nutrients, just like their pharmaceutical counterparts, can produce many undesirable side effects. Bet you didn't know that! The physiological responses normally created by food nutrients are mimicked for a short time by the body, but then eventually the body exhausts itself. Taking parts of a whole leave your body even more deficient for other nutrients.
Synthetic (or crystalline) vitamins are like taking gears of a watch, strapping them to your wrist and trying to tell time. They are incomplete and need their other parts, in this case enzymes, amino acids, other vitamins and countless other things man has yet to discover. They work as a team in your body, which not even the most brilliant chemist can produce or combination of synthetic vitamins can create.
Simply put, when you purchase vitamins, minerals or any other nutrient, make sure it says it's from a food, a food you're familiar with. The label shouldn't have any parentheses and the "other ingredients" shouldn't have things you have to sound out or look-up. Any vitamin that says its from something HCL or something Hydrochloride, trash it. That's petroleum-based. Ascorbic acid too is just the coating on the vitamin C complex. Your body will want the rest of the vitamin.
So feed your body right. And if you're confused talk to someone who knows what I'm talking about. If they don't, walk away, fast.
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