Natural Ingredients In Vitamins by Amy Wermuth. Starch may be used in many vitamins and drugs to make them healthier, eco-friendly, and more cost effective...

BizRate

Some Vitamins and Drugs May Get a Starch Make-Over

There’s good news for our natural ingredients in vitamins fans out there. Penn State food scientists state that vitamins and could possibly piggy-back on starch compounds making stable vitamin enriched ingredients. This will also work with many of the cheaper control release drugs (prescribed drugs) on the market.

This new method of using starch to deliver vitamins to the body may provide pharmaceutical and food companies a less expensive, more eco-friendly alternative in making many medications, vitamins and other products. As an advocate of the most natural vitamins and minerals, we are happy to hear of this.

In a succession of scientific experiments, researchers fabricated casings with corn starch and a fatty acid product to carry oil soluble vitamins, like vitamin A and C, into the body.

As with many products, exposure to heat and acids can quite simply break-down and ruin vitamins and many medicines. Researchers found that when starch was used it acted as a barrier and protective casing around the vitamins as they travel through the stomach which is loaded with digestive acids. Vitamins are much better absorbed and have much better results when they are absorbed through the blood stream in the small intestines.

To create the casing, researchers used a type of corn starch named high amylose maize starch, a type of corn starch. When amylose mixes with fatty acid products of certain vitamins like vitamin A, it creates an inner wall that is water resistant and an outer wall that attracts water. The oil soluble molecules automatically move into the inner wall that encapsulates the vitamin or medicine.

A professor for food sciences at Penn State stated that the real work is to get the correct balance of the inner and outer walls.

The same professor added that there are a large number of beneficial factors for using starches as hosts for delivering drugs and vitamins. Here at Natural Vitamins Online, we certainly advocate using more natural ingredients in vitamins and the method of using starch to deliver vitamins to the body. The few top reasons we like about using starches to deliver vitamins and minerals to the body because, it is very eco-friendly, starches are common and a more natural approach to vitamin ingredients, starch is biodegradable and effortlessly absorbed by the body. Using corn starch to deliver vitamins and medicines into the body may very well become very cost effective as well.

The pharmaceutical industry (more so than the vitamin industry) uses other ingredients and methods to create complexes.

Corn starch could easily be used in a wide selection of other means as well. The beauty industry (make-up) can benefits from using starch. Look at the eco-friendly containers that are made from corn starch products. Even optical and electronic devices can benefit. We do know that this new research has more work to be done, but we are surely excited to hear starch is getting even more coverage when it comes to creating a more natural approach to vitamins, medicines, and hopefully more consumer products.

Further information on this research can be found in a recent issue of Carbohydrate Polymers. Additionally, the Pennsylvania Agricultural Experiment Station advocates the research findings. Finding the best natural vitamins may be a bit easier to do in the future!

By: Amy Wermuth