Extraordinary Health Magazine Extraordinary Health Vol 21 | Page 13

reverse engineered nature— starting with synthetic vitamins and finding a way to make them more like real food. Where Do Multivitamins Come From? Hint: They Don’t Grow on Trees. Since Garden of Life® was founded, we’ve always wanted to make a multivitamin that was from real, nutritious organic foods. We’re not alone in that goal. To understand why, it’s helpful to have a brief look at history. Birth of Synthetic Vitamins During World War II, military doctors understood that armies living on canned, processed rations for months at a time, and with limited access to fresh fruits and vegetables, were especially vulnerable to nutrient deficiency diseases. So, synthetic vitamins were created by using the newly developed technology of making plastic from inexpensive and widely available petroleum. They succeeded in isolating, fermenting and synthesizing single-nutrient vitamins. But what we have been missing in multivitamins is nutrients from real, honest food—full of essential “co-factors” that help the body to absorb, process and utilize vitamins and minerals. Next Up: Reverse Engineered Nature The industry spent the next two decades on a strange path of invention. Rather than starting with real food and working all the way down to a tablet, scientists We credit Dr. Endre “Andy” Szalay, a Hungarian pharmacist, as the first scientist to “crack the code.” By combining a synthesized vitamin with a plant in which it could grow (yeast), and introducing growth agents (sugars) as well as specific peptides, Andy created what we believe to be the first “cultured whole food” vitamin. The new vitamin was more affordable, more convenient and, most importantly, more concentrated than the vitamin C in an orange, for example, and it contained some of the food factors that were present in that orange. All of today’s leading “whole food” vitamin companies—including Garden of Life®—use cultured or grown whole food nutrients