Liposomal Supplement Facts

OPEN LETTER TO ALL THE SUPPLEMENT REVIEW SITES

We admire your intention to guide customers towards optimal products at competitive prices. However, we have concerns that certain deceitful companies have manipulated their way to the top of your recommendations by providing misleading information. We thought it would be helpful to reach out and inform you about the inaccuracies surrounding some of the products you endorse, so you can make more informed decisions.

 

How Many “LIPO/Liposomal” Supplements are Real?

More and more dubious supplement companies are adding the term LIPO to their supplements and telling customers that it “protects their powdered product from digestive enzymes & carry it into the bloodstream for targeted systemic delivery.”

They also site numerous scientific information that is partially correct, but they are not using this in their products, they only make the customer think they are using this. On the product label it is stated that sunflower lecithin and ordinary vegetable cellulose capsules are in the ingredients. Just adding sunflower lecithin does nothing to make a product liposomal and having an ordinary off-the-shelf capsule is not enteric.

Let’s start with some simple biochemical definitions.

1. Enteric – being or having a coating designed to pass through the stomach unaltered and disintegrate in the intestines.
2. Liposomal - A drug preparation that contains the active drug inside very tiny, fat-like particles.

Using enteric (lipid polymer coated) capsules is the only current cost-effective way for dietary supplements to pass through the stomach and release in the small intestine for proper absorption.

FACTS TO CONSIDER

• Currently only mid to large pharmaceutical companies make liposomal drugs (Johnson and Johnson, Gilead Sciences, Novartis, Luye Pharma, CSPC, Ipsen (Onivyde), and Teva Pharmaceutical) and none of them offer NMN or NR. The cost to manufacture liposomal products is very high and equipment is custom engineered.

• Companies are claiming their active ingredients are liposomal at average price for the market, which is inconsistent with what the price would be if they could purchase liposomal compound power.
• Nowadays, the freeze-drying of liposome dispersions is still necessary to provide a solid dosage form intended for different routes of administration (i.e., parenteral, oral, nasal and/or pulmonary). However, after decades of studies the optimization of process conditions is still challenging and expensive since the freezing and the dehydration destabilize the vesicle organization (liposomal shell) causing drug leakage. So, any claims of products fully being protected and absorbed are incorrect. Again, this is if they could even get a company to provide such a liposomal product.
• If companies could even get liposomal compounds, the resulting size of the active ingredient would increase by 3 times (diameter) and a 9-fold increase in volume. This would make a 250mg dose of NMN impossible to fit into a size ‘0’ capsule. It might be possible to get 250mg into a size ‘000’ but customers would not wish to or could not swallow a capsule this size. See figures 1&2 below for a visual example of a typical liposomal coating on an active ingredient.    

Thorne Research, Life Extension, Toniiq, Elysium, ChromaDex, and GeneX Formulas do not have liposomal products. These are cutting edge supplement companies and you would think they would jump on the liposomal wagon, but no, they are honest companies.

• Renue by Science* (the worst offender), CodeAge, ProHealth, and DoubleWood are claiming “Lipo” supplement. Also, almost all the fake Chinese supplement companies do this also. The last two on the list surprised us because we have known and communicated with them for many years and did not think they would do this.

So, unless amazing new technology has occurred and now any organic compound can be made liposomal (in powdered form) at a very low cost without effecting the volume of the product, then we know these companies are either ignorant or just lying.

ADDING LECITHIN DOES NOT MAKE IT LIPOSOMAL!

We have investigated this and requested our parent biochemical company to provide insight. They said it would not be economical. They also stated that freezing was old tech and newer, still expensive methods such as extrusion, micromixing and Mozafari method are employed to produce materials for human use, but only for pharmaceutical drugs, not supplements.

At this time UltraHealth appears to be the only company using liposomal capsules, which are about twice as expensive as regular cellulose fiber capsules. Why these other companies are not spending an extra dollar a bottle to make their product truly enteric and liposomal is beyond our understanding.

*We will be going into detail on this company and others in one of our future blogs; How to spot a fake or suspicious supplement company”.

Thank you for taking the time to read this.

If you have ANY questions, please do not hesitate to contact The UltraHealth Store!