Are Liquid Vitamins Better than Vitamin Pills?

Absorbing nutrients from vitamins is an important issue.  If vitamins don’t get absorbed, you wasted your money.  When I started in the wellness industry 12 years ago, we spent a great deal of time on the absorption issue. Except for pharmaceuticals, the law doesn’t require tablets to dissolve  in order to be sold.  That means your vitamin tablet was not tested most of the time.

Liquid vitamins are popular because many people just don’t like swallowing pills. Chewable tablets don’t often taste good, and it can be  difficult to teach children how to swallow pills. (Some tips here).

Doing some searches for independent information on liquid vitamins was extremely difficult.  98% of the references were by distributors of liquid vitamins. ( The Shaklee Corporation does make a liquid vitamin called Liqui-lea.)  I did find a good article by Dan Ho.  Consumer’s Reports had a little info, but they tend to be negative on supplementation anyway, and do not distinguish between synthetic and natural supplements.

Because the average person doesn’t have a good understanding of the digestion process, it’s very easy to sell the idea of liquid vitamins.  Nutrients are absorbed in your small intestine, not in your stomach.  The purpose of your stomach is to begin the process of breaking down your food.  The rest of the breakdown happens in the small intestine. Your liver, gall bladder, pancreas all supply hormones, enzymes, etc to the small intestine, to complete the process.  There your body extracts the nutrients, makes other vitamins, assembles the protein chain, and it is absorbed through the tiny, finger-like villi.  There is a belief that liquids somehow break down in your stomach more easily. People think that liquid vitamins have somehow “saved a step” in the digestion process. Yet even water must be digested- ever experience water sloshing around in an empty stomach?

Vitamin manufacturers, many of whom do NOT do any clinical testing or third party verification of their products are looking for a competitive edge.  If they can play into popular myth that liquid vitamins are
more easily absorbed, without providing proof, then they do it.

Some vitamins are water soluble.  That means that any nutrient suspended in liquid – like vitamin C, will be completely worthless, because it will break down completely in the bottle before you swallow it. Did the manufacturer takes steps to ensure that the vitamins and minerals in the liquid supplement are stable?  That
they don’t interact in the bottle? What about molecular structure?  Your body requires that certain nutrients come in specific forms – despite what a marketer will tell you.

From Keith Anderson of the Shaklee Corporation:

“There are a few issues with liquid vitamins. Let us start by confirming that liquid vitamins have no absorption advantages over tableted or gel encapsulated supplements. And, yes, water soluble vitamins are unstable and lose potency very quickly in a liquid medium.

Once ingested, nutrients have to be separated from their carriers via the body’s natural chelation process and reunited with the appropriate enzymes and proteins within the body to be redistributed to where they are needed. The body doesn’t care if these nutrients come via liquid or tablet…the chelation
process is necessary with either form.

Another issue of major importance is that nutrients are absorbed through receptors present in various locations along the digestive tract. This is why the time release feature of the SMART delivery system utilized in Vitalizer is so important in maximizing nutrient absorption. Ideally, you do not want vitamins to all be released at the same time in one nutrient dump into the stomach, where certain nutrients are diminished by the acid environment”.

Bottom line- ask to see the clinical studies and third part verification of any brand that you are taking.  Ask for absorption and bioavailability studies.  Learn a little about how your body works yourself, and you will be well prepared in shopping for supplements.