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Magnesium Stearate – And Other Scary Chemicals
Written by Wellness Club on October 5, 2012 – 12:19 pm -Are we really being bombarded with toxic chemicals, even in our vitamins?
By Nurse Mark
The world is a scary and dangerous place, and we hear every day about new threats to our health and well-being. Bacterial contamination in foods causing illness, industrial toxins finding their way into our water and air, even supposedly safe FDA approved drugs like steroid injections now found to be killing people with fungal meningitis – is there nothing, and nowhere that we can feel safe?
Marketers know they can use peoples legitimate fears to their advantage. As a consequence, many otherwise innocuous and even healthy substances are made to sound “bad” so that advertisers can promote their products as being free of the supposedly “dangerous” substance.
The vitamin and supplement industry, like any other industry, is not immune to the siren call of marketing hype. When you are offering a product that is the same as that offered by your competitors you must work hard to find a way to be different, to be better – to give the consumer a reason to buy yours, and not the other guy’s. Sometimes the easiest way to do that is to suggest that there is something wrong – something bad or dangerous – about the other guy’s product but that yours is safe and good because it doesn’t have that bad thing. Entire ad campaigns can and have been built on that premise – theirs is bad, ours is good – and it is one of the oldest marketing techniques around.
We get a lot of questions about chemicals and additives and the safety of supplements and vitamins – since people are being bombarded daily by advertising from Big Pharma telling them that supplements are dangerous and drugs are safe, and by supplement marketers claiming that their vitamin is somehow better than everyone else’s because everyone else’s is bad.
Sharon recently wrote to ask:
I like the multiple vitamin capsules for post menopausal women. The mg and mcg amounts are the amounts I like to take, however I do not like the magnesium stearate that is used in the capsules. I like capsules with no fillers. I have seen other companies make vitamins without magnesium stearate. Can you explain why it’s used.
Thank you, Sharon
And here is our reply to Sharon:
Hi Sharon,
This is a great question – and questions like this are received often enough here that we have written about “chemical additives” several times and even produced a video dealing specifically with Magnesium Stearate.
Dr. Myatt recently addressed the Magnesium Stearate issue. A reporter saw Dr. Myatt’s video and interviewed her on the subject for an industry publication. You can see the video and read that interview here.
Here is a link to our original HealthBeat News article and Magnesium Stearate video – I hope you will take a moment to enjoy it.
Here are a couple of other articles that I have written regarding chemicals and chemical additives – I hope you will find them entertaining and educational.
Chemicals That Kill? Or Just Frighten?
By the way, while Maxi Multi does contain tiny amounts of magnesium stearate to ensure homogenicity and dose consistency it also contains Arabinogalactan as a “filler.”
Dr. Myatt takes great care when she designs her formulations, and Arabinogalactan, while technically listed as a “filler” is actually a valuable form of fiber that has been shown in some studies to have antineoplastic and anti-metastatic (anti-cancer) properties – so you see, everything present in Maxi Multi is there for a very, very good reason!
Learn more about Maxi Multi, including it’s ingredients, here.
Hope this helps and I hope you’ll subscribe to our free HealthBeat newsletter for more information like this!
Cheers,
Nurse Mark
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