Raw Food-Created Nutrients™

“I knew it was only a matter of time before somebody with the experience in the supplement industry like Jordan Rubin would come along and figure out how to make a top-quality line of multivitamins made from raw nutrients.”

- Paul Nison, author and speaker about the raw lifestyle

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.