The science behind Inessa Multivitamins

Why Do We Need Multivitamins?

Multivitamin supplements are an important way to ensure optimal daily nutrition and support general health and wellbeing. However, not all products are equal. Inessa Advanced Multivitamin is a professionally formulated multivitamin and mineral providing optimal levels and forms of the right nutrients, because quality matters to your health.

Optimal nutrition is vital to ensuring health and wellbeing, and a well-balanced diet remains the most important way to ensure adequate intake of essential vitamins and minerals. However, due to modern dietary habits, suboptimal intakes of nutrients are very common, making nutritional supplements an important consideration for most people.1

Multivitamins are not intended to replace healthy eating, but instead leading experts recommend that they are used as part of a healthy diet and lifestyle.2 Importantly, multivitamins are proven to be very safe, can help fill important “nutritional gaps,” and have well demonstrated health benefits.3

How do we compare?

Multivitamin products vary greatly, with important differences in the nutrients they contain, including the number of nutrients, the dosage level, and the type of nutrients. Inessa Advanced Multivitamin provides 26 nutrients, at levels that experts recommend to ensure optimal nutrition, with forms of nutrients that are more effective than others. The result is simply a multivitamin that provides the right nutrients, in the right amounts.

A board-spectrum of vitamins and minerals is important for providing optimal intake of a wide range of vital nutrients each day, but products can differ greatly. The following table shows you just how much leading multivitamin and mineral products can vary in nutrient content and levels:

Comparison to Popular Multivitamin Products

Inessa Wellness Multivitamin with 100mg CoQ10

The purity of your product is also important, which is why we don’t use any unnecessary additives or chemicals such as titanium dioxide, flavourings or colourings.4 5

What Are Active Forms of Nutrients?

The type of nutrients in your dietary supplement can be very important, improving the nutritional quality and benefits of the product. Inessa Advanced Multivitamin provides the best possible forms of various nutrients. Excellent examples of this are the forms of folate, vitamin D, and vitamin K used in our product.

Folate is the name of a family of different forms of a vitamin, but these different forms have different activity in the body. Folic acid, the most common form used in multivitamins is not the active form of the nutrient, and because of genetic differences in folate metabolism, is not the most effective form for many people. L-5-methyltetrahydrofolate (5-MTHF), on the other hand, is a form of folate that is more natural and better utilized by the body.6

Vitamin D is available in two forms as a dietary supplement, vitamin D2 and D3. Vitamin D3 is a more active form of vitamin D and is more effective at improving your vitamin D levels than vitamin D2.7 The superiority of D3 may also extend to health effects, with evidence suggesting it is better for you as well.8

Vitamin K is a term for a family of related vitamins that have important differences in activity. A number of types of vitamin K are used in dietary supplements, however a particular form of vitamin K called menaquinone-7 (MK-7) is much better absorbed and considered a superior form of vitamin K for optimal nutrition.9

What are optimal doses?

Most people are unaware that, with few exceptions, the recommended daily allowance (also known as the RDA, or Nutrient Reference Value; NRV in Europe) is the minimum amount required to prevent an extreme deficiency, and not a level for optimal health.10

In fact, the RDA has been criticized for being un-scientific and an inadequate reference for our nutritional needs.11 A major weakness of the RDA level is that it is unlikely to provide the level of nutrition that will help prevent the major illnesses in society today.12

To provide you with the best multivitamin and mineral, Inessa Advanced Multivitamin is based on levels of nutrients that have been determined by world-leading research, including recommendations for an optimal daily intake of 500mcg for vitamin B12,13 2000 IU per day of vitamin D,14 100mcg of vitamin K,15 400mcg of folate,16 1000mg of boron,17 150mcg of iodine,18 20mg of zinc,19 and 55ug of selenium.20

No unnecessary nutrients

Perhaps the most overlooked qualities of a good multivitamin and mineral product, is the absence of unnecessary nutrients. Some are impossible to provide in a once-daily tablet in a meaningful amount, while others are not needed and may even have unwanted effects.

A condition that causes a build-up of excess iron, known as hereditary hemochromatosis, is relatively common, and even if you do not have hemochromatosis long-term dietary iron excess could contribute to chronic health problems.21 Like iron, long-term copper excessive intake of the mineral copper is also associated with potential adverse effects.22 For these reasons we recommend that people without iron or copper deficiency take Inessa Advanced Multivitamin, which is iron-free and copper-free.

Multivitamin supplements frequently contain minerals in amounts that are nutritionally meaningless. These minerals - potassium, calcium and magnesium - are known as “macro” minerals, because they are required in large, amounts, much larger than most multivitamins provide. Requirements for these nutrients are at least 320-420mg per day for magnesium,23 1200mg for calcium,24 and 3510mg for potassium.25 These levels are impossible to fit in a single tablet, and are best achieved with a separate dietary supplement and/or food. Inessa Advanced Multivitamin has no magnesium, potassium or calcium because no once daily multivitamin can provide therapeutic amounts.

Beyond a multivitamin

A nutritional advantage of Inessa Advanced Multivitamin is that it provides more than just vitamins and minerals, with the addition of the macular carotenoid lutein, and coenzyme Q10. These nutrients go beyond simply providing essential vitamins and minerals to support you with an important phytonutrient and nutritional co-factor, for better nutrition.26 27

▶ Inessa Advanced Daily Multivitamin

  1. Rautiainen S, et al. Dietary supplements and disease prevention - a global overview. Nat Rev Endocrinol. 2016 Jul;12(7):407-20.←
  2. Frei B, Ames BN, Blumberg JB, Willett WC. Enough is enough. Ann Intern Med.2014 Jun 3;160(11):807.←
  3. Ward E. Addressing nutritional gaps with multivitamin and mineral supplements. Nutr J. 2014 Jul 15;13:72.←
  4. Shi H, Magaye R, Castranova V, Zhao J. Titanium dioxide nanoparticles: a review of current toxicological data. Part Fibre Toxicol. 2013 Apr 15;10:15.←
  5. Kumar A, Aitas AT, Hunter AG, Beaman DC. Sweeteners, dyes, and other
    excipients in vitamin and mineral preparations. Clin Pediatr (Phila). 1996 Sep;35(9):443-50.←
  6. Scaglione F, Panzavolta G. Folate, folic acid and 5 methyltetrahydrofolate are not the same thing. Xenobiotica. 2014 May;44(5):480-8.←
  7. Tripkovic L, Lambert H, Hart K, Smith CP, Bucca G, Penson S, Chope G, Hyppönen E, Berry J, Vieth R, Lanham-New S. Comparison of vitamin D2 and vitamin D3 supplementation in raising serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D status: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Am J Clin Nutr. 2012 Jun;95(6):1357-64.
    ←
  8. Bjelakovic G, Gluud LL, Nikolova D, et al. Vitamin D supplementation for prevention of mortality in adults. Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2011 Jul 6;(7):CD007470.←
  9. Sato T, Schurgers LJ, Uenishi K. Comparison of menaquinone-4 and menaquinone-7 bioavailability in healthy women. Nutr J. 2012 Nov 12;11:93.←
  10. Heaney RP. The nutrient problem. Nutr Rev. 2012 Mar;70(3):165-9.
    ←
  11. Beaton GH. When is an individual an individual versus a member of a group? An issue in the application of the dietary reference intakes. Nutr Rev. 2006 May;64(5 Pt 1):211-25.←
  12. Fenech M. Micronutrients and genomic stability: a new paradigm for recommended dietary allowances (RDAs). Food Chem Toxicol. 2002 Aug;40(8):1113-7.←
  13. Stabler SP. Vitamin B12 deficiency. N Engl J Med. 2013 May 23;368(21):2041-2.←
  14. Holick MF, Binkley NC, Bischoff-Ferrari HA, et al. Evaluation, treatment, and prevention of vitamin d deficiency: an endocrine society clinical practice guideline. J Clin Endocrinol Metab. 2011 Jul;96(7):1911-30.←
  15. Shearer MJ, Fu X, Booth SL. Vitamin K nutrition, metabolism, and requirements: current concepts and future research. Adv Nutr. 2012 Mar 1;3(2):182-95.←
  16. Obeid R, Holzgreve W, Pietrzik K. Is 5-methyltetrahydrofolate an alternative to folic acid for the prevention of neural tube defects? J Perinat Med. 2013 Sep 1;41(5):469-83.←
  17. Devirian TA, Volpe SL. The physiological effects of dietary boron. Crit Rev Food Sci Nutr. 2003;43(2):219-31.←
  18. Zimmermann MB. Iodine deficiency. Endocr Rev. 2009 Jun;30(4):376-408.←
  19. Brown, K. H., Rivera, J. A., Bhutta, Z., Gibson, R. S. et al., International Zinc Nutrition Consultative Group (IZiNCG) technical document #1. Assessment of the risk of zinc deficiency in populations and options for its control. Food Nutr. Bull. 2004, 25, S99–S203.←
  20. Rayman MP. Selenium and human health. Lancet. 2012 Mar 31;379(9822):1256-68.←
  21. Gozzelino R, Arosio P. Iron Homeostasis in Health and Disease. Int J Mol Sci. 2016 Jan 20;17(1).←
  22. Brewer GJ. Copper toxicity in Alzheimer's disease: cognitive loss from ingestion of inorganic copper. J Trace Elem Med Biol. 2012 Jun;26(2-3):89-92.←
  23. Gröber U, Schmidt J, Kisters K. Magnesium in Prevention and Therapy. Nutrients. 2015 Sep 23;7(9):8199-226. doi: 10.3390/nu7095388.←
  24. Emkey RD, Emkey GR. Calcium metabolism and correcting calcium deficiencies.Endocrinol Metab Clin North Am. 2012 Sep;41(3):527-56.←
  25. WHO . Guideline: Potassium Intake for Adults and Children. Geneva: World Health Organization (WHO); 2012.←
  26. Johnson EJ. Role of lutein and zeaxanthin in visual and cognitive function throughout the lifespan. Nutr Rev. 2014 Sep;72(9):605-12.←
  27. Garrido-Maraver J, Cordero MD, Oropesa-Avila M, Vega AF, de la Mata M, Pavon AD, Alcocer-Gomez E, Calero CP, Paz MV, Alanis M, de Lavera I, Cotan D, Sanchez-Alcazar JA. Clinical applications of coenzyme Q10. Front Biosci (Landmark Ed). 2014 Jan 1;19:619-33.←