THORNE RESEARCH

Have you checked the effectiveness of the vitamins you are consuming?
If you are satisfied with mass marketed discount multivitamins, Thorne Research may not be for you. After all, if the only reason you take a multi is so that you can feel like you are doing something for your health – and if you aren’t searching for dramatic results you can really feel every day, then by all means keep doing what you are doing and read no further.

Because Thorne Research Nutritional Supplements are the product of painstaking scientific research, not aggressive TV and radio marketing - you’ll be getting a much more comprehensive health boosting formulation than what’s available on supermarket shelves and health food shops. Sure, it may be a little more expensive, but that extra money goes into quality ingredients to ensure maximum potency, effectiveness and absorption – not in marketing funds.

What is the Thorne difference?

Actually being a manufacturer
Most supplement products including a number of “practitioner only” products, are manufactured by “jobbers” who have large production facilities that churn out a multitude of formulas for various companies. The recent example of the Pan Pharmaceuticals debacle brought to light that they supplied approximately 70% of the natural health industry in Australia under various brands and most of those products were sold in New Zealand. Thorne Research is a manufacturer, not just a sales or distribution company.

What is the problem with Contract/Jobber manufacturing?
Contract Manufacturers work on a given profit margin and if a product does not run on specific machinery at optimum speed, then various lubricants are added to ensure tablet or capsule production meets schedule. At Thorne, the manufacturing process is considerably more difficult, since no product-compromising flowing agents are utilised.

For example, CoQ10 with the addition of ascorbyl palmitate results in manufacturing output of 120,000 tablets per hour, but when Thorne process it without any palmitate, their output is 8000 capsules per hour, i.e. it will take Thorne 15hours to produce the same quantity.

Manufacturing Thorne products to the rigid standards requires much more effort than any other method. It is Thorne’s commitment to its customers.

Raw Material Choice
Every manufacturer has two basic choices available for raw materials: purchase either truly pure raw materials, or purchase raw materials to which substances have been added to facilitate manufacturing.

For example, Thorne never uses common diluents like soy, oil, corn, starch or lactose. Many standardised herbs are spray dried on lactose. Thorne never uses those suppliers.

As another example, Thorne never uses pre diluted Vitamin K, D or B12. They make their own dilutions using magnesium citrate. All other nutritional supplement manufacturers take the easy way and buy in these pre diluted vitamins which typically contain lactose, sodium benzoate and sorbic acid.

Avoiding Unnecessary Ingredients:
Tablets must contain flowing agents, lubricants, binders, fillers and disintegrants in order to be made into tablets. Pharmacutical glaze, confectioners glaze, or natural glaze may be the name of the ingredient you see on the label, but these are just euphemisms for the real name of the ingredient – SHELLAC – that’s right, the same substance used to varnish furniture. Shellac is used because it makes a tablet “shiny” and easier to swallow.

Encapsulated products or powders are not free from these kinds of ingredients either. Lubricants such as stearic/palmitic acid, labelled also as magnesium stearate or calcium stearate, or sometimes ascorbyl palmitate are employed by almost all manufacturers. These additives are used to ensure that the machinery output is maximised, these additives do nothing to the quality of the product.

In a classic study published in Pharmaceutical Technology, the results of mixing a nutrient with magnesium stearate were demonstrated. After twenty minutes the percent dissolution of the nutrient decreased from 80-90% dissolution without magnesium stearate, to only 25% with magnesium stearate. It is crucial that customers realize whenever they see magnesium stearate or ascorbyl palmitate on a label that the supplement contains a mixture of saturated fats used as flowing agents. Stearic acid melts at about 68 degrees C and Palmitic acid at about 63 degrees C – so imagine your nutrients trapped in a sphere of waxy substances similar to candle wax.

The bottomline is that the addition of any stearic/palmitic acid is simply a manufacturing aid and can have an adverse impact on both solubility and bioavailability of the nutrients in the supplement being manufactured.

Thorne has always manufactured to Good Manufacturing Practices or GMP’s that exceed those currently proposed by the industry.
Thorne supplements are sold in Australia and their facility in Idaho has been approved in December 2002 by the Australian Therapeutic Goods Association (TGA) until 2005.

 

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