History Behind our Vitamins

Our company originated as a retail business in 1970.  Within a few years, during the mid-1970's, we began buying vitamins in bulk directly from manufacturers to do our own packaging.  As we learned of the manufacturing techniques used to produce these vitamins, we discovered they fell far short of the natural supplements we thought we were selling.  The use of digestible plastics, modified cellulose, waxes, and stearic acid was common.  We deduced that the various complaints from customers using these products, ranging from stomach aches, head aches, and rashes to feelings that the products were of no value, had to be due to the use of these excipients.  Every individual has the metabolic pathways to handle the labeled supplement potencies.  With this knowledge, we endeavored to undertake the manufacture of our own food supplements, using only food ingredients in their inherent recognizable form.

During this period of developing manufacturing techniques, our production facility was located in the same building as one of our retail operations.  This provided a unique opportunity to gain direct market response to various production techniques.  We found that people responded positively to certain products and we were able to monitor repeat sales closely.  We widened our use of those techniques that gave us good responses.

In the mid 1980's, we began manufacturing for various physicians who used food supplements in their clinical practice.  In discussions with these physicians, we shared our experience with various food ingredients used as excipients to make tablets.  We found the common characteristic of the food or food extracts that our retail customers had gravitated to was that they all served as growth factors for lactal and bifido species bacterium.  These are the friendly bacteria in the digestive tract commonly known as acidophilus.  With this knowledge and using established literature, we identified additional food extracts that serve as growth factors.  In addition, we developed a technique for stabilizing freeze-dried ferments of these important bacteria, which enabled us to put them into the base of our tablets, thereby supplementing the friendly flora plus growth factors with every dose.

The importance of fostering the growth of these bacteria is well established and best illustrated by the fact that mother's milk provides the nursing infant with bifido growth factor together with the bacteria.  The nursing infant's digestive tract becomes populated by almost 100% bifido bacterium; this is the single most important factor resulting in the lower statistical incidence of allergy chronic disorder and digestive problems seen in nursed infants versus bottle-fed infants.  Clearly, bottle feeding cannot invoke this digestive tract flora condition.  Research continues to demonstrate the relationship between an individual's gut flora being primarily bifido and lactal bacterial and one's state of health.

The importance of these bacteria can be viewed by considering all people having these bacteria in their digestive tract.  People live everywhere on earth consuming widely different diets (Eskimos are consuming blubber; Polynesians are eating coconuts.)  Yet we all develop into essentially the same organism.  The leveling factor is that we consume food, the bacteria in our gut eat the food, and we eat the bacteria.  Much of the important biochemical that constitutes our cell walls and other functional mechanisms comes from gut bacteria.  When the gut is populated primarily by lactal and bifido bacterium the biochemical harvested from these species is recognized as self by the immune system.  When the gut is dominated by other micro flora, such as yeast, the biochemical derived from these species is not recognized as self by the immune system when incorporated into one's cells.  This typically leads to an autoimmune response such as diabetes, chronic fatigue, arthritis, heart disease, skin problems and general malaise.

The bacterial flora in one's digestive tract is essentially the soil our bodies are rooted in and like any other organism, we need the proper nutrient load and the proper synergistic bacteria to maintain proper function and good health.