Similar to Nuvana, but at double the cost
I've been consuming a whole food vitamin from Garden of Life called myKind Organics Men's Once Daily, and in recent months have been trying the competition, including Amazon Elements Organic Whole Food Men's Multi, Nuvana Multifood Whole Food Multivitamin, and the men's and women's varieties of True Grace One Daily 40+ Multivitamin. I've recently tried Truvani Organic Multivitamin, which has a serving size of 3 tablets, similar to the serving size of 3 capsules for Nuvana rather than the serving size of 1 or 2 tablets like the other products I've tried. While Truvani and Nuvana provide different volumes of vitamins and minerals, however, Truvani generally provides less of each. The most drastic example of this is for zinc, of which Nuvana provides 15mg and Truvani provides only 1mg. But is this really a factor of 15 difference? I'm not sure, because the zinc provided by Nuvana is sourced from Saccharomyces cerevisiae, a unicellular fungus, whereas the zinc provided by Truvani is source from an "organic food blend" of 12 ingredients. Another interesting difference in the supplement facts of these two products is the volume of vitamin A provided per serving: Nuvana provides "1500mcg RAE", and Truvani provides 375mcg. So what is "RAE" intended to mean? Before I looked up this term, I did some math using the "DV" (daily value) provided on the label for each. The 1500mcg RAE of Nuvana provides 170% DV, meaning 100% DV is 882mcg, and the 375mcg of Truvani provides 42% DV, meaning 100% is 893mcg. I've noticed in the past that daily values of many supplements aren't standardized, so I've gotten in the habit of ignoring most of this labeling, but in this case I was trying to derive what "RAE" might mean. In this case, it appears there are just some rounding errors, most likely due to what Nuvana claims, but the volumes are virtually identical. From some light research, it looks like "RAE" means "retinol activity equivalents", and generally speaking, this term can be ignored. The RDA ("recommended daily allowance" of vitamin A is reported as RAE to account for the different bioactivities of retinol and provitamin A carotenoids, both of which are converted by the body into retinol. Provitamin A cartenoids are plant pigments that the body converts into vitamin A in the intestine. Now, unlike Nuvana, which doesn't state the type of B12 it provides, Truvani explicitly states that it provides "methylcobalamin" (methyl B12), but unless you have the MTHFR gene mutation, you shouldn't be taking methyl B12. That said, the 12mcg of methyl B12 provided by Truvani is such a trivial amount that it's largely irrelevant: I personally take 3000mcg on a daily basis apart from my daily multivitamins. Combined with the significantly more expensive pricing of Truvani considering serving size and quantity of tablets provided in each bottle, Nuvana and Garden of Life seem to have the edge. I'm still on my journey to better understand the differences between synthetic "isolate" vitamins versus whole food vitamins, but the sudden unavailability of Twinlab Daily One Caps multivitamin I had been taking up until several years ago actually worked out in my favor because it caused me to start taking a closer look at supplement facts.
Rating: 4 stars