Good Nutrients vs. the Bad and the Ugly

“Oh, I love reading your letters, Dr. Sears. You tell me what all the best supplements are and what I should be taking. So I read your stuff and then I do an Internet search and find the cheapest source…”

I heard this from two different readers I met in the last two weeks. One in Las Vegas and one in South Beach.

On the one hand, I’m happy that so many people are taking control of their own health. On the other hand, using the cheapest supplements is not a very good idea. This is one place where I don’t recommend cutting corners.

Knowing how complex nutrition is, and how much I had to put into it to become a licensed clinical nutritionist, I don’t trust too many doctors that don’t have the same experience.

There’s so much misinformation out there that I set out to find trusted sources of nutrients and minerals for my patients.

My exhaustive investigation of the supplements on the market proved to me, sadly, that most fall woefully short. Some simply don’t have the vitamins and minerals you need most. And some, shockingly, don’t even have enough of the very nutrients that are supposed to be in the bottle.

Ordinary multi-vitamins are the worst. Many use the cheapest, synthetic ingredients. A study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine shows that you would need over 400 times some of amounts in ordinary vitamins for them to have any real benefit.¹

And the huge companies that make them aren’t practicing physicians. They don’t even know what amounts you need for your best health. So I ditched the whole idea of a multivitamin, and instead created a super-nutrient, Daily Power, with the doses I recommend from experience and training.

Here’s what Daily Power gives you vs. most other brands:

I don’t want my patients going out and buying a bottle of 400 vitamins for $30 where the whole bottle only has one day’s worth of Daily Power. I can’t say it enough. If you’re just buying vitamins, you’re buying next to nothing.

CoQ10 is another one I hear of where people want the cheapest kind they can get. It’s maybe the best example of why you don’t want to cut corners.

I became one of the first doctors in the world to offer the ubiquinol form of CoQ10. It’s 8 times more powerful than the old ubiquinone form that you still see on most store shelves. It’s not cheap, but I don’t mind biting the bullet to give you the best chance at a healthy heart.

Other manufacturers obviously don’t have the same ethics. Sure, you can find cheap CoQ10 out there that says “ubiquinol” on the bottle. But I think I’d cringe if I knew where it came from. There’s only one company that makes true, patented ubiquinol, and that’s where I get it. It’s not cheap. If you find “ubiquinol CoQ10” for only a few dollars, it’s simply not the real thing.

Cheap formulas also don’t have synergistic nutrients added for your benefit.

For example, CoQ10 works even better when you add the form of vitamin E that protects your heart: tocotrienols.

This is the kind of thing that corporations, which mass-manufacture vitamins, overlook. There are eight different “vitamers” that make up vitamin E. There are four tocopherols and four tocotrienols. The gamma tocotrienol alone boosts your cells’ antioxidant strength by 300%² and protects your heart.

Tocotrienols are expensive. But they make CoQ10 better. So I added them to my formula without passing the cost on to you.

And I’m not done yet. Because another of nature’s most powerful antioxidants works well with CoQ10. So I’ll soon be adding it to my best-selling CoQ10 formula. This nutrient is a little known carotenoid called astaxanthin. It’s 54 times stronger than the carotenoid you probably know best, beta-carotene. And it’s 65 times stronger than vitamin C.

Here again, you have to be careful of cutting corners. You can go out on the Internet and find cheap astaxanthin. But it will be synthetic… which is made using petrochemicals.

What’s worse is synthetic astaxanthin is more than 20 times weaker as an antioxidant than natural astaxanthin. So those people who go for the “cheap” option are really getting robbed. They’re paying $1 for 5 cents worth of antioxidant strength.

And here’s the real shame… most companies make an astaxanthin product tell you all about the benefits from all the different scientific studies… problem is, those studies show their benefit at 10mg of natural astaxanthin. Most supplements only give you half that amount and again, use a much inferior form than was used in the studies.

So I tell everyone who asks me about my products the same thing. When you spend your hard-earned dollar for my products, you can be sure you’re getting 100% of the effectiveness, the best, purest quality, the right combination of nutrients in the right doses, backed by my 30 years of research, knowledge and experience.

1. Christen, W., Glynn, R., Chew, E., et al, “Folic Acid, Pyridoxine, and Cyanocobalamin Combination Treatment,” Archives of Internal Medicine 2009; 169(4): 335-341.
2. Nowak G, Bakajsova D, Hayes C, Hauer-Jensen M, Compadre CM. “γ-Tocotrienol Protects Against Mitochondrial Dysfunction and Renal Cell Death.” J Pharmacol Exp Ther.2011 Oct 31