By the sound of that title, I’m surprised you’ve gotten this far! I had to get your attention and tell you the truth about most of the vitamins that you pick up at your local store.

First let me say, there’s no judgment here!  I admittedly used to purchase my vitamins at Target and Costco, not knowing there was any kind of difference.  Not feeling any different should have been my first clue.

Before I get into porta potties, let me first make a comparison. One that happened just this morning while I dropped off the kids.

I pulled up at school today in my Ford Explorer. Nothing out of the ordinary. I parked next to a Tesla.  What’s my point? Ford is a car.  Tesla is also a car. Both are cars, but the Tesla is considered to be a much higher quality product over my Explorer. No arguments there, right?

So back to my “vitamins, supplements and porta potties” story.  I got to thinking about “vitamins” and how similar to my car illustration, too many people fail to realize this difference also exists in the nutritional supplement world. Too many, including people who are supposedly in the know say, a multi-vitamin is a multi-vitamin — they are all the same.

Nope!

This is not so.  There is a huge difference in quality levels in the highly unregulated supplement industry.

Not to get too scientific, but I want to highlight one aspect of nutritional supplements and how they are processed by our bodies. This is called dissolution (or disintegration).  This means that in order for the nutrients from a supplement to be bio-available to the body, the tablet/pill must break down in the digestive tract. Seems like common sense to me.

In unscientific, mom-speak, I wanted to be sure my supplements were actually doing something in my body and that my money wasn’t going to waste! Total no brainer.

So, how can you tell if your supplements and nutritional products are being absorbed by your body? 

• Clue #1 – You will feel a difference (more energy, focus, better overall mood). At first you may not attribute this to your supplements, but when you take a supplement with a high dissolution rate that can be absorbed by the body, you will feel better.
• Clue #2 – You will notice a difference in your skin, hair, and nails.
• Clue #3 – If you have regular check-ins with your healthcare professional, your numbers may begin to tell the story of consistent nutrition in your body (those amazing vitamins, minerals and omegas your body needs).
• Clue #4 – You will notice a difference in your energy level and mood if you forget to take them or leave them behind while on vacation.

This is ONLY with supplements that are whole-food, nutrition-based, and high dissolution/absorption in the body that you will receive these kinds of results.

What if the vitamins you are taking don’t make you feel that way?  What if like many other women have told me, they can’t take vitamins because they make them feel sick.  What if you take those brick vitamins like the ones I used to get at Target and Costco?

My answer?

You guessed it…

It’s time for my porta potty story!

So, about 2 years ago I was teaching a class on natural alternatives like essential oils and nutritional food-based supplements when a lady from the back of the room (whom I did not know, by the way) asked if she could tell her story about vitamins.

“Of course!”, I exclaimed, not knowing at all what she was going to say.

Her husband worked for a well-known waste management company in our town. He was in the portable toilet department.  That alone made the entire class laugh!  This was serious stuff, though.  His main job was to empty porta potties from construction sites, mostly.  He told her that when he cleaned out the holding tanks, all he would find were all kinds of vitamins tablets trapped in the screens that they use to filter the waste! 

With the whole class squirming in their seats and squealing, “gross!”, I said, “Wow! It’s too bad he couldn’t tell us which brands they were.” To which she said, “Oh, I can tell you the brand names! He could still read the brand name inscription on the pill itself!”

While I was quite pleased to have my suspicions on vitamins confirmed that most did not break down during digestion and are eliminated from the body, often intact, I quickly made sure to illustrate to the class that if there’s no break down, then there’s no bio-availability, which just means wasted money!

Whole-food, high absorption and dissolution are just a few of many attributes that need to be looked at when making your decision on nutritional products of choice.  This story totally highlights the need to do your homework before grabbing whatever is on the end-cap at your grocery or big-box store.

And if you aren’t careful, you just might be flushing your money down the toilet!

To find out what nutritional supplements my family and I use, shoot me an email and I’ll tell you all about them – as well as let you in on what brand tablets were found in those porta potty screens!  Ewwwww!

You can also check out our Keep It Zimple – Public Oil Education & Support group over in Facebook if you would like to hear more about our supplements, essential oils or natural alternatives as options.  We are sharing our 10 DAYS of LOVING OUR HEALTH featuring our incredible supplements and client testimonials during the month of February.

Trust me when I tell you that you’ll never think of porta potties and vitamins in the same way ever again!