Once in a while we get technical questions about our whole food supplements, such as how long it takes them to dissolve once you eat them, or what kinds of ingredients are used to hold our tablets together and why we don’t use stearates like other companies do. If you’re not interested in such technical garb, the following may lull you into a nap. Otherwise, enjoy.

From NutriPlex Formulas’ Laboratory:

1. BINDERS
In order to create a tablet, ingredients other than “active” ones need to be used. Active ingredients in NutriPlex Formulas’ products include only whole foods and herbs. We do not use isolated, chemical vitamins, minerals, amino acids or proteins. Inactive ingredients, also known as “excipients,” are used for several purposes — as flow agents, so raw ingredients can flow into a tableting press, preservatives, flavorings, emulsifiers and so forth. Supplements commonly contain questionable materials as inactive agents. We DO NOT use any of these. A common flow agent is magnesium stearate (or stearic acid). You will find this in most supplements, but we won’t use it because stearates act as transfats in our bodies. We also won’t use ascorbic acid or other preservatives. Some companies will tell you ascorbic acid is the same as vitamin C, but we understand that since it is not a food, it is not really natural. The only inactive ingredients we use are cellulose and silica. Cellulose is a plant fiber, and silica is a fine mineral that keeps our active ingredients from clumping.

2. DISSOLUTION
Digestion is the key to any substance your patients consume. NutriPlex’s products break down at various rates, depending on the particular formula. Still, the longest product to dissolve is CalMag Balance, which takes ten minutes after swallowing. Most of our formulas take between five and seven minutes. We periodically test this dissolution rate at the completion of production, using an acid of the same pH as stomach acid. We must remember, however, that the body’s enzymes are crucial to the digestion of food particles. Fats are broken down by lipase, carbohydrates by amylase, and protein by protease, for example. Because digestion is so critical in the role of nutrition, natural health practitioners traditionally work on digestion as the first course of patient treatment. An optimal functioning digestive system optimizes the beneficial effects of whole food nutrients.

3. GLANDULARS
In some of NutriPlex’s products, we utilize glandular ingredients. Because of the low quality and standards of USDA animal products, we procure our glandular ingredients from organic, sustainable and/or drug- and chemical-free bovine sources. Other supplement companies use porcine (pig) and ovine (sheep) glandulars in their products. This is a practice we are outspokenly against. Porcine organs are repeatedly shown to be unreliable regarding quality and cleanliness.

One of the most disturbing facets about glandulars — sources that we refuse to use in our products, which include USDA beef and porcine — is that they come from animals that have been injected with antibiotics, steroids and other hormones that have been proven to have a negative health effect on the consumer. Our glandulars come from New Zealand, drug free sources from animals fed on chemical-(pesticide and fertilizer) free feed, free range on farms.

NutriPlex’s supplements incorporate whole glandulars that are not processed in any way other than to remove the water content. Other supplement companies have been known to use isolates, concentrates, PMGs and other altered materials. The value we’ve discovered in whole glandulars include a host of important nutrients that benefit a wide array of tissues that require unadulterated proteins and amino acids.

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