Vitamin Code from Garden of Life
RAW Food-Created Nutrients™

Why RAW?

Imagine yourself 100 years ago describing the latest craze in health and nutrition, the - RAW - food movement, with someone living at that time. RAW Foods are natural, uncooked, untreated, unadulterated - NO BINDERS and NO FILLERS. Right after you finished sharing what you consider a groundbreaking concept of consuming foods in their natural state with that person, they would most likely stare at you and tell you that you just described the way they eat every day. What is now considered unique and advanced was for our ancestors the norm.

In today's modern system of agriculture, the use of pesticides, herbicides, fungicides and chemical fertilizers allows the average acre of farm land to yield more food than that same acre would have 50 years ago. The flip side of that is due to all of those chemicals, our food is not as nutrient dense as it once was. A comparison of U.S. Department of Agriculture food composition tables from the 1960s and 1970s to the present day reveals that the vitamin and mineral content of the nation's breadbasket has declined 25 percent to 50 percent in just the last generation.

Our food is less nutritious coming off the farm. This fact is made much the worse when you consider what we do to our food after it leaves the farm. In the name of convenience, safety and even marketing, we subject that food to processing such as irradiation, chemical preservation, heating and treating. Food is created solely based on how well it can be packaged, shipped and sold and not in terms of the nutrition it should be providing. This whole concept supports the maxim that we are overfed and undernourished.

In order to overcome the "nutritional gap" created by an increasingly under-nutritious food supply, many people turn to multivitamins. Unfortunately most multivitamins are chemically isolated, synthetic versions of vitamins and minerals found in food. They are inorganic, lifeless.

We've replaced food with an anti-food. Until the Vitamin Code™, there have been few options available for those who wish to supplement with a RAW, living multivitamin. The Vitamin Code represents the next breakthrough in multivitamins.

The RAW Factor

When you consume RAW foods you are consuming all of the vitamins, minerals, enzymes, probiotics and phytonutrients contained therein. Simply heating foods can result in the loss of hundreds of these co-factors. When you add different chemical treatments and adulteration to the mix, you are often left with food that is a shell of its former self.

Most people readily accept this premise. Who among us would argue that eating a canned fruit cup in syrup is better than eating a fresh apple?

While all foods provide some nutrition, RAW foods provide higher levels of the 45 nutrients we need to supply our bodies every day. In addition, the co-factors mentioned above are incredibly important. Our bodies are designed to take in food and then break it down in order to glean nutrition from that food. Co-factors such as probiotics and enzymes aid this process. The probiotics and enzymes present in RAW food aid the digestion process, allowing the body to break down the food and assimilate the nutrients into the bloodstream. Nature provides the complete package of vitamins, minerals and co-factors necessary for the body to maximize the nutrient potential of RAW food.

No supplement can compare to the benefits associated with consuming RAW foods. If you have a nutritional deficiency or you just don't eat a healthy balanced diet you probably need to supplement to give your body the basic nutrition it needs to function properly. If you are going to supplement, you should seek out a RAW, Whole-Food multivitamin. The Vitamin Code is a multivitamin that was developed to provide supplemental nutrition as close as supplementation can get to actual RAW food.

Is Your Multivitamin RAW?

At no point during the cultivation process are the vitamins and minerals treated, adulterated or cooked. More importantly is what you won't find on the label - no binders or fillers. The Vitamin Code nutrients are 100% active, meaning that every ingredient contained within them has nutritional value and purpose. The Vitamin Code represents a breakthrough in multivitamins: RAW, living multivitamin/mineral supplements.

Raw Food-Created Nutrients

The next time you plant a tomato bush, pick an orange from a tree, or drive by a farm that grows peppers, you will find the inspiration for The Vitamin Code. The tomato bush, the orange tree and that field of peppers all share a common biological trait. They absorb inorganic material from the soil and turn them into vitamins and minerals bound to the proteins, complex carbohydrates, flavanoids, glycoproteins, fibers and other parts of the plant.

The process is simply described and you may remember it from high school biology. The soil that these plants are grown in is replete with inorganic materials (known by chemists as inorganic salts). When the plants take root, they pull these inorganic salts from the ground. When sunlight is added to the process, the plant uses these inorganic salts to make vitamins and plant bound minerals.  Additionally there are other co-factors created in the growing process such as enzymes and phytonutrients. Taken together, the vitamins, minerals and co-factors are what give the food created its nutritional power in the body.

The process used to grow the vitamins and minerals for The Vitamin Code multivitamins mimics the process found in the plant kingdom. Each individual vitamin and mineral found in the six Vitamin Code formulations is individually grown in single batches. For the purposes of explaining the process we will focus on one mineral, selenium.

The process for growing selenium starts with a single-cell plant, in this case Saccharomyces cerevisiae, or baker's yeast, which we most commonly associated with bread and baked goods. S. cerevisiae was chosen because it retains the complex cell structure of a plant, but it is also easy to grow. The S. cerevisiae is mixed with water that has been subject to a multi-stage purification process to ensure that it is free of any unwanted ingredients that will affect the growing process. Molasses is then added as food for the yeast and the yeast is allowed to begin the budding and growing process.

At the same time the yeast is growing, in a separate cultivation tank, the isolated selenium has a specific peptide complexed to it. A peptide is a chain of amino acids and they play an important role in the absorption of selenium by the yeast during the growing and metabolization process.

At the proper time in the growing process, the peptide complexed selenium is added to the growing S. cerevisiae. The peptide allows the selenium to pass through the cell wall of the S. cerevisiae. Without the peptide, the selenium could not penetrate the cell wall of the yeast. The selenium would remain an inorganic salt, a lifeless material. However, the peptide allows the selenium access to the S. cerevisiae where it displaces sulfur and then imbeds itself to specific amino acids in the natural protein backbone of S. cerevisiae. The selenium becomes a part of the S. cerevisiae. Since S. cerevisiae already contains some selenium, it also contains all of the co-factors you would normally associate with selenium. The end result then is S. cerevisiae that is rich in selenium and selenium co-factors.

In order to halt the growing process of the S. cerevisiae and make the nutrients created more available, enzymes called papain (from papaya) are then added to break down the cell wall of the S. cerevisiae. Once this is accomplished the enzymes are deactivated. The enzymes chosen for this task are done so because they are susceptible to lower temperature thresholds. The mixture is brought to 113 degrees, deactivating just the papain enzymes. More importantly, this low temperature allows other important enzymes created during the growing process inherent to S. cerevisiae to live on. In fact the raw ingredients used in the Vitamin Code contain a variety of enzymes and other bioactive compounds, including but not limited to antioxidants, glycoproteins, lipoproteins, glutathione, CoQ10 and SOD (superoxide dismutase). It is incredibly important to remember that these co-factors are not added to the process, they are created by the budding and growth process. Like a plant growing in a farmer's field, the process used to grow our vitamins and minerals creates powerful co-factors. We go to great lengths to ensure that these co-factors are not destroyed during the growing process.

In addition to the growing of vitamins and minerals in S. cerevisiae, The Vitamin Code also uses vitamins and minerals grown in Lactobacillus bulgaricus, an important probiotic. The process is very similar to the process used with S. cerevisiae, with one distinct difference   The peptides used for L. bulgaricus are distinct from S. cerevisiae in order to assure the nutrients are effectively absorbed into the probiotic.

You may ask why The Vitamin Code uses the two different probiotic growing processes (S. cerevisiae and L. bulgaricus) and the answer is pretty simple. Each process contributes its own unique set of co-factors to the final raw ingredient. By including vitamins and minerals grown in each process you are offered a wider array of beneficial co-factors.

Raw 100% Active

The world of supplements and vitamins can often be confusing for the everyday American looking to be healthy. One aspect that consumers often overlook is how a product is manufactured, and more importantly, what happens to the "raw material" during that manufacturing process.

Although many marketers employ a whole host of "novel" forms for vitamins and minerals, such as liquid drinks, gummy chews, chocolate chews, or effervescent drink wafers - the primary options are tablets or capsules.

Tablets are the most popular and widely available option to the consumer. As we have discussed in this book, so many people are looking for the convenient, once a day formula for their multi and the tablet is ideal for this market. The primary advantage of a tablet is that you are able to compress a relatively large amount of "raw material" into a compact pill that is "easy to swallow". However, this comes with a cost.

In order to make a tablet, a surprising large amount of steps need to be followed in order to ensure the tablet takes the shape, and maintains the shape all the way from the factory to your cupboard. Ingredients are mixed, blended and sometimes ground or pulverized in order to make sure the particle size of the raw material is consistent. Depending on the raw material that is being tableted, binding agents are added to ensure the material holds together throughout the tableting process.

Just a few decades ago, small start up companies would manufacture their products "in their own garage"; however today the industry utilizes state of the art facilities and cutting edge technology and manufacturing best practices in order to realize efficiencies and speedier delivery to market. What this means is that practically all the vitamins or supplements you see in the store go through multiple stages and machinery in the manufacturing process.

When it comes time to compress that raw material into a tablet, a special machine that generates an intense amount of pressure "punches" the material through a mold or die. Unfortunately, along with the high pressure required to punch the tablet comes high heat as well which can alter or affect the integrity of the raw material. And as manufacturers are always looking to optimize production, they are finding ways to produce more tablets per minute. The fastest tablet machines typically have the highest heat and pressure.

One final step is required to ensure the material holds together through the packaging stage and the transport to market - spray coating. This is yet another step of processing the material will need to endure and this often times comes with ingredients or added compounds that are inactive (fillers) that comprise the coating, as well as high temperatures at the application of the coating and the drying time.

When evaluating the products available on the shelf, look for the term "Other ingredients".  There you will find binders, fillers, excipients, flow agents and other additives such as:

• Maltodextrin
• Corn starch
• Magnesium stearate
• Stearic Acid
• Silica
• Cellulose gum
• Guar gum
• Soy Lecithin
• Milled soy

Some of these additives do have some nutritive value, but relatively low in comparison to the vitamins, minerals or other key nutrients you are looking to derive from the product. And on the low end 8-15% of the weight of the product can be these "Other ingredients" and on the high end 20-25%. And the regulations are not always clear on exactly how a marketer of the product is to disclose this to the consumer.

Encapsulation, on the other hand, is simply the filling and combining of two ends of a capsule with the raw material ingredients. The primary drawback of this delivery form is that you can fit less material into the shape size. For instance, one of the largest capsules available will hold approx 600 mg of material whereas a tablet that is approximately the same size will hold 1100mg of material.

The advantage of encapsulation, especially when aiming to deliver a RAW Food-Created Nutrient™, is that there are minimal steps in the process and you don't have the need for binders, fillers, high pressure and heat tableting, or spray coating. So the material maintains its intrinsic value and pristine quality, all throughout the process to bring the product to market.

With the Vitamin Code RAW Food-Created Nutrients, you will find an encapsulated material that has been meticulously controlled and minimally handled to deliver you the highest quality nutrients possible.  Vitamin Code formulas are uncooked,, untreated, minimally processed, and contain live enzymes and probiotics - delivering to you the ultimate in raw, whole food nutrition. They contain no binders and no fillers. Every ingredient in the product has nutritive value, making the Vitamin Code multivitamins 100% Active.

The Importance of Enzymes

There's an aspect to Raw Food-Created Nutrients that is important, and it's called the food enzyme theory. First, some background:

Back in the 1930s, when biochemists were discovering the last batch of vitamins and minerals like vitamin K and vitamin B6, researchers were also learning that proteins act as catalysts for all chemical reactions in the body. They called these proteins enzymes. Scientists initially identified eighty enzymes eighty years ago; today more than 5,000 enzymes have been discovered. Our minds can barely comprehend how complex the role of enzymes are when you consider that a single human liver cell contains at least 1,000 different enzyme systems.

Enzymes not only initiate chemical processes in the body by removing parts, adding parts, or just snipping off a piece to change their makeup, they do so quickly and efficiently. Without enzymes, life would slow to a standstill because chemical reactions inside our bodies wouldn't happen fast enough unless enzymes were part of the mix. Enzymes seem to be particularly important for proper digestion, followed by tissue and organ repair.

Enzymes do their work by reducing the energy required for the individual reactions to take place. In other words, enzymes make it easier for two proteins to react together, which is an incredible circumstance when you consider that hundreds of thousands of reactions take place in the body every minute. For example, your central nervous system is busy processing information while your digestive system is processing your last meal. Your immune system is handling the many germs and particles that have entered your body, your heart is beating, and life-giving cells are being made and replaced as other internal systems carry out a multitude of other intricate processes. All of these functions involve thousands of different enzymes.

The late Edward Howell, M.D., and author of the seminal book Enzyme Nutrition, was among the pioneers who began studying the role of enzymes in the late 1920s and early 1930. After extensive clinical and laboratory research, he began sounding the alarm about the importance of eating the right foods to ensure a proper level of enzyme activity within the human body. He was particularly attentive to the role that digestive enzymes play in keeping us healthy because when the digestive tract goes off the rails, life can be miserable. Just ask anyone suffering from food poisoning or diarrhea resulting from the intestinal flora imbalance caused by taking antibiotics.

Digestive enzymes break down food so that our bodies can use the nutrients contained within that food. When food is swallowed, it moves to the stomach and then to the small intestine, followed by the large intestine. At each step along the way, specific enzymes break down different types of food. For example, an enzyme designed to digest protein has no effect on starch, and an enzyme active in the mouth may not be active in the stomach. Ideally, though, these enzymes work together, digesting food and delivering nutrients to cells to maintain their health.

To make sure that our bodies have the digestive enzymes needed to break down the proteins, starches, and fats in the foods we eat, Dr. Howell declared that it's very important to eat certain raw and fermented foods high in enzyme content. The enzymes in raw food help jump-start the process of digestion and reduce the body's need to produce digestive enzymes, he believed.

Raw foods are best since some enzymes are deactivated "a nicer word than destroyed" at a wet-heat temperature as low as 118 degrees Fahrenheit and a dry-heat temperature as low as 150 degrees. It could be a design of nature that foods and liquids at 117 degrees can be touched without burning yourself, but liquids over 118 degrees will burn you. Thus, there is a built-in mechanism for determining whether or not the food we are eating still contains its enzyme content, according to Sally Fallon, author of the book, Nourishing Traditions.

Cooking food destroys important enzymes, said Dr. Howell, and a diet composed exclusively of cooked food puts a severe strain on the body, drawing down its reserves. If the body is constantly overstimulated to produce enzymes that ought to be in foods, the result over time will be inhibited functions of the body and/or nutrient deficiencies. Humans eating an enzyme-poor diet, comprised primarily of cooked food, use up a tremendous amount of their enzyme potential in the outpouring of secretions from the pancreas and other digestive organs.

The result, according to Dr. Howell, is a shortened life span, illness, and lowered resistance to stress of all types. He pointed out in his book Enzymes for Health and Longevity that humans and animals on a diet comprised largely of cooked food, particularly grains, have poorer health that is evident when certain organs are examined postmortem.

"Dr. Howell formulated the following Enzyme Nutrition Axiom: The length of life is inversely proportional to the rate of exhaustion of the enzyme potential of an organism. In other words, the increased use of food enzymes promotes a decreased rate of exhaustion of the enzyme potential. Another sage rule can be expressed as follows: Whole foods give good health; enzyme-rich foods provide limitless energy," wrote Sally Fallon in Nourishing Traditions. Unfortunately, our diets do not consist of these health-giving foods, and even if they did, the grains, fruits, and vegetables coming from our soil-depleted field don't hold a candle to the nutritious bounty found in harvested crops prior to World War II.

While we could all stand to include plenty of raw foods in our diets - bountiful salads teeming with greens, tomatoes, and onions instead of cooked broccoli, baby carrots instead of crinkle-cut potato chips and sour cream dip, and a bowl of in-season strawberries and blueberries instead of a heaping helping of vanilla ice cream - the reality is that few people think "raw" when planning their menus. This is where supplements made from raw ingredients - such as Vitamin Code Raw Food-Created Nutrients - supplement the body with enzymes missing from cooked foods.

Enzymes are delicate dynamos. Delicate because many enzymes start to be destroyed when they reach a temperature of 118-140 degrees Fahrenheit, and they are obliterated when they stay at that temperature for even a miniscule period of time, which eliminates most steamed and cooked vegetables. Dynamos because these powerful biochemical catalysts are necessary for digestion, breathing, talking, moving, cellular energy, tissue and organ repair, neutralization of toxins, and brain activity. Dr. Howell said that although the body can manufacture enzymes, the more you use up your enzyme "potential" - meaning a regular diet of cooked, canned, or processed foods - the more you place yourself at risk for developing nutrient deficiencies that translate into serious health woes further down the line.