Vitamin Supplements or Energy Drink?

Today, my friends and I hang out in a nice coffee shop while having friendly conversations. The topic went to whether it is better to have vitamin supplements or energy drinks? Well, that shows you that we did not have much topics to discuss, huh? hehehe.

My friend was telling me that he used to have energy drinks only when he needs to stay awake to finish some work. He can stay up 3 days straight without sleeping because he continuously consume energy drinks. Wow... that is something! I hope the quality of works is as good as the effect of energy drinks on him. He does not take it regularly because he is afraid of the "unconfirmed" side effects.

Vitamins supplements, on the other hand, is something that he takes regularly. But he makes sure that the ingredients are somehow natural.

That natural thing raise a question to myself. How do we know that the ingredients are natural as companies trying to declare their vitamin supplements as natural. Well, the simple guide below that I found in organic customer might help. Company can cheat by putting the descriptions below. That is why it is important as well to buy from the trusted company.

How can I read product labels to be able to determine if a particular vitamin or supplement is truly natural or synthetic?

If a vitamin/supplement product label uses words like "Food State", "Food Source", "Food Base", “All natural” , or “Organic”, can I assume that it truly is what it claims to be? There are quite a few companies that use this kind of labeling, but many of them are not being clear on their labels and other literature that they use a medium of fermented or mixture of foods that have been spiked with synthetic vitamins. Many products contain synthetic vitamins which are put into our supplements even though the label says "all natural." One easy way to tell is to look at the RDA. If the potency is higher than anything you would find in nature (example 1000% Daily Recommended Allowance of Vitamin C per serving), the product contains synthetically produced ingredients, no matter what the producer of that product might claim.