After bariatric surgery, your body digests food differently–yet you still need vitamins and minerals just like you did before. Your body has been modified to interact with food in a new way. Your ability to ingest food has been altered but your need for nutrition remains the same. Herein lays the problem. How do you get the nutrition you need without the volume of food that you are used to eating?
Bariatric Supplements for Your Health
Vitamins, minerals, and other key nutrients have to be delivered to your body in a new way. Supplements are an effective way to bridge the gap of nutrition. The key to effective supplementation is to incorporate quality supplements into your diet.
Unfortunately, the supplement market is overloaded with companies making outrageous claims with products that are chock full of harmful and useless fillers.
What are Fillers?
Put simply, fillers are the extra ingredients that are added to most vitamins and supplements. These ingredients take the form of thickeners, starches, gums, and oils which are all used to help maintain the shape of pill-type supplements. Artificial flavors and colors are there to make chewable supplements more pleasant to use.
While these fillers make your vitamins easier to consume, they also block minerals from being absorbed. Malabsorbtion is already a common problem with bariatric patients, which is why we take supplements in the first place. But supplements with filler can make the problem even worse.
In other words, your vitamins probably aren’t doing you much good if they are chewy or taste good.
Why Chewable Vitamins are a Waste
Chewable bariatric vitamins and mineral supplements use filler to make themselves chewy. In fact fillers can account for almost half of the actual content of the product. Striving for consumer appeal is tempting and many companies will add non-nutritive ingredients for this purpose.
Why would some companies do this? Without fillers many of these supplements wouldn’t taste very good. Vitamins and minerals often have a sour or metallic taste which is unsuitable for chewable vitamins. By masking these tastes with fillers the vitamins are easier to take but have lost much of their potency. Nutrition has been sacrificed for taste.
If you want to maintain the highest potency of nutrition from your supplements, you need to steer clear of chewable and even liquid supplements. These products contain too many additives that counteract their usefulness.
Quality bariatric vitamins contain only vital nutrients with no fillers and additives. This will ensure that your body receives optimum levels of nutrition at the highest potency.
Finally it’s nice to see some truth on the web.