With the number of supplements and vitamins on the market today, you’re likely feeling just as overloaded and overwhelmed as the next person in your choices.

While it may certainly be a good thing to have many choices when it comes to your health, it’s also difficult to know exactly why and how nutritional supplements differ, and what qualities they have that may make them more or less effective. Each company has their particular spin and choice of emphasis (natural ingredients, super potency, particular forms of each nutrient, etc.), and so it’s easy to feel constantly confused and swayed in your search for the best nutritional supplements.

We’d like to help, and potentially answer some of the biggest questions you might have about vitamins and nutrients, and specifically speak to some key characteristics to look for when buying a nutritional supplement.

Our basic rules:

1. Is the supplement tailored to your biological needs?

Just as you wouldn’t feed babyfood to an adult and expect that they will get all the nutrition they need, we each need particular nutrients and minerals in specific amounts at different times in life. Men need different nutrients than women, and adults need much different than children. A ‘one-size-fits-all’ attitude from a vitamin company is a sure-fire sign that their products aren’t what you’re looking for.

2. Are the nutrients included in a highly bioavailable form?

We have discovered through laboratory study that nutrients can exist in many ‘forms’, some of which are easy for our bodies to use and others which are difficult to absorb in a supplemental form. Thankfully, we now know many of the forms that are optimal for use in nutritional supplements, and a good company will make sure that their products only contain those forms. If this is not noted by the company you’re buying from, chances are they might not be considering it, and their products could be of inferior quality.

3. Are there minimal fillers and binders and other ingredients?

Our bodies need less toxicity, not more, and especially when we’re taking a vitamin supplement one would hope we wouldn’t be putting more chemicals in. Unfortunately, a lot of inexpensive products on the market contain large amounts of fillers and binders that are known to be damaging to the human body, as they allow the supplements to be produced quickly and less expensively. While buying a supplement with natural binding agents and colorings (if at all) may be more expensive, it’s definitely worth it for your health.

And lastly…

4. Are the nutrients inside combined in a compatible manner?

A very new concept to the multivitamin stage, compatibility stands to change the way we think about and consume vitamins forever. Based on long-standing scientific knowledge about the interactions that occur between elements in a multivitamin product, a supplement that takes compatibility into consideration will make sure that negatively-interacting elements (such as copper and zinc, as a pair) will be kept separate from each other so that they do not inhibit absorption, while positively-interacting elements (such as calcium and vitamin D) are consumed at the same time so as to maximize utilization and efficacy.

The best nutritional supplements out there will take all of these questions into consideration, and thus a superior and safer product will result. It’s in your best interest to make sure that the products you consume are the safest you can find (as this is all to support your long and short term health!), so we urge you to investigate.