What would your ancestors have done?

Your body has been extracting nutrients from food for 200,000 years. The supplement industry has been trying to replicate that for 70 — and most of them are getting it very wrong.

Most people assume that if a supplement says "Vitamin B6" or "Vitamin C" on the label, it's the same thing your body gets from food. It isn't — and for some nutrients, the difference isn't just about effectiveness. It can actually cause harm.

Bioavailability — your body recognises food, not chemicals

When a nutrient arrives in food, it comes packaged with cofactors, enzymes and companion compounds that your body uses to absorb it. Take Vitamin C — in a whole food it arrives with bioflavonoids that dramatically increase absorption. As ascorbic acid in a tablet, it arrives alone. Your body absorbs a fraction of what the label claims, and passes the rest.

The B6 problem — when synthetic supplements become toxic

Pyridoxine — the synthetic form of B6 found in almost every multivitamin and B-complex on the market — can accumulate to toxic levels in the body. Unlike food-form B6, pyridoxine isn't readily converted and can build up over time, causing nerve damage, numbness and tingling in the hands and feet. This isn't rare. It's increasingly reported, and most people taking a daily multi have no idea it's happening.

The future of health isn't a lab — it's a farm

The supplement industry spent 70 years trying to isolate, synthesise and compress nutrition into a capsule. The science is now catching up to what traditional cultures knew all along — that whole foods, in their complete form, are what the human body actually runs on. Not approximations of them.

"After 25 years in clinical nutrition, the single biggest shift I made was stopping recommending synthetic supplements. The difference in patient outcomes was immediate." — Ange Gioffre, Clinical Nutritionist