Does your doctor care about what you eat? If you can eat anything you want, supplements are those things you should be getting in all your meals, so they’re going to be fine. All of our products are safe daily amounts and they’re in mixtures that make them even safer. So basically, if your doctor doesn’t care what you eat he doesn’t care that you are taking supplements. If your doctor does care, if he is monitoring everything that you put in your body, take the product, show your doctor, and ask them if it’s okay…it never hurts to ask.

The Food and Drug Administration approves drugs. They don’t approve supplements. Now there is a law, called DSHEA, that monitors supplement usage and we’re governed under that. There’s no such thing as an FDA approval for supplements. But, we voluntarily make all our products in an FDA approved drug lab and voluntarily make our products according to FDA drug standards, which is really unusual in the supplement industry.

GRAS stands for Generally Recognized As Safe. While the FDA doesn’t have an approval process for food supplements, they do have a disapproval process. They look at all of our ingredient decks to ensure they appear on the FDA GRAS list. Since our products are sold in countries around the world , they are not only tested by us, we send our products to a third-party FDA-approved drug lab in order to get a certificate to ship our products around the world.

This is a label that is found on some of our products. It simply means that our products are better than organic.  If something is certified organic it means that the organic farm that it came from didn’t use pesticides or herbicides when they grew it. However, that doesn’t mean that it isn’t contaminated. We have had incidences in the past where we have had things come in from a certified organic farm and yet when we tested them, we found the presence of herbicides and pesticides. In cases where this was consistent we did a little bit of deep looking and found out that the problem was contamination by rain water. There was an area where herbicides and pesticides were used, it rained and that contaminated rain water affected the raw materials. They were still contaminated even though they were organic. If something is organic it doesn’t mean it’s protected from rainwater, groundwater, or soil contamination or handling. The raw materials in all of our products are tested right when we receive them. We are looking for the prescense of herbicides, pesticides, heavy metals, and mercury in some cases. We’re also looking for Salmonella and E. coli and many of the things you read about in the news. All of our products are tested for purity and potency before we start to use those raw ingredients and that makes us better than organic.

"Phyto" means plant and "nutrient" means a beneficial ingredient that comes from a plant. Any phytonutrient is just some kind of vitamin or mineral that came from a plant substance. All vitamins could be phytonutrients if they came from a plant. Not all phytonutritnes are vitamins, but they could be depending on their source.

This is something that’s becoming more important as we go forward in time because what’s happened is that we’ve gotten away from small farms or people doing their own farming and ensuring that they’re putting good fertilizers in the ground. We’re using all kinds of herbicides and pesticides and then we’re processing the foods.  The US Department of Agriculture have looked at soil and found that it’s vastly lacking in nutrients. Much of the wheat that is grown or even the rice that is grown is going to be lacking in things like zinc because it’s simply not in the ground so it can’t go into the plant. And, because we process things, studies have shown that when you process food like rice (from brown to white) you lose about 81 percent of the zinc. Same type of thing, you lose 78 percent of zinc when you go from brown flour to white flour. And so we have very little if anything in the ground and then we process it and we refine away whatever was there. We end up with something that is really quite lacking in nutrition. It’s essential we put those things back in.

The three major causes of disease in the United States, I like to say, is breakfast, lunch, and dinner. We’re eating the wrong foods, too much of the wrong foods, and in some cases we’re skipping the meals that we need in order to be really healthy. So it’s essential if you want to be healthy that you’re taking a simple multivitamin. It’s a health insurance policy. It’s a life insurance policy to make sure that you feel good.

Omega-3 are also called Essential Fatty Acids and they’re essential for life. Every cell in your body is made up of essential fatty acids. They are also called ecosanoids. Ecosanoids regulate other hormones in the body. They turn them on and off. Omega-3 turns off inflammation.

A doctor recently asked why we didn’t have a lot of Omega-6 in our product. He thought that the perfect product would be a 1:1 ratio of Omega-3 to Omega-6. That is absolutely not correct. They estimate that in the perfect human diet the ratio of Omega-3 to Omega-6 to be 1:1, but in our typical modern diet it’s more like 18:1 or even 20:1 in favor of Omega-6. Omega-6 is often found in processed wheat products—breads and cereals, and a lot of the things we eat. They vastly outnumber Omega-3. As a group, the Omega-6 causes inflammation, so they’re bad for us. In that 1:1 ratio the Omega-3 keeps the Omega-6 in check. Because it’s in a 20:1 or 18:1 ratio we really need to supplement with the Omega-3. We don’t want to supplement with the Omega-6 because we have too many of those.  Omega-3 are anti-inflammatory and they also help with heart disease, hormonal balance, weight loss, and vision. Intelligence-studies have shown that pregnant nursing women taking Omega-3 will have children with higher IQ’s.

We have cancer, heart disease, stroke, and diabetes for both men and women depending on the government site you look at right now. The really import thing to remember is that they’re very related to diet. You get to decide which one of those diseases you want by what you eat or don’t eat. It’s very important, if you want to help prevent disease, that you’re taking a multivitamin. That’s why Ultra Vitality^TM is so important.

In most cases, yes they are. It’s either they’re not in the food or we’re not eating it. If you’ve ever been around the world you see that supermarkets, like we know them, don’t exist in many parts of the world. We have the best food choices in the world. It’s just that Americans also make the worst food choices in the world. That’s why Ultra Vitalitytm is so important.

Everything works on the cellular level. Everything is broken down in the GI system and it has to work on a cellular level. Of course, the real key for this is that it has to be digested. If you can’t digest the food and get it into your system it can’t work on a cellular level. Digestion is very important. Ultra Vitality^TM actually includes digestive enzymes and herbs that enable your body to make more digestive enzymes. We’ve had many people with digestive problems using Genesis^TM or Lipo-Sorb^TM or Mega Juice^TM that experience a great benefit from that.

A lot of people first start looking at nutrition because they’re sick. One of the reasons they’re sick is that they’re not digesting food very well. And, so they start to take nutrition or get medication from a physician and can’t break it down. So it doesn’t work well. By putting these new ingredients in there, we have a patented process that releases the vitamins, minerals, and enzymes in a particular order—a layering technology in Ultra Vitality^TM and DeltaZorb^TM— it increases absorption by up to 160 percent. This ensures they’re getting all of the nutrients essential for good health.

Oxidative stress is a byproduct of life. Anybody that’s alive and breathes oxygen is going to have some oxidative stress. Sometimes we’ll get this from ultra violet light; from sun exposure. You can get this from toxic fumes from places that you might work, exercise. Exercise is a double-edged sword. It’s really good for you, but when you exercise you also produce more free radicals and that’s what causes this oxidative stress.

If oxidation happens really fast we call it fire and when it happens slowly we call it rust. If your elbow rusts out you have arthritis. If your eyes rust out you have cataracts. If your brain rusts out you have Alzheimer’s disease. If your heart rusts out you have heart disease. And, so you need antioxidants to help protect against oxidative stress.

Oxidative stress causes inflammation. Inflammatory disease is one of the things that make us get older. It causes arthritis. Now they’re saying that this inflammation in the body is a really good marker of heart disease. If you have this inflammatory process going on in your heart it’s probably going to be causing a heart attack in the future. Anti-inflammatories are really very important. I’m not talking about non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. Those are the most widely used class of over-the-counter drugs in the world, but they cause tens of thousands or actually a quarter of a million bleeding ulcers every year. So there are some side effects to those. So using the natural anti-inflammatory like Omega-3, resveratrol, or ellagic acid, which is in Genesis^TM, you can help fight oxidative stress and inflammation and feel better.

Oxidized cholesterol is what forms the plaque in the arteries. If you have a high cholesterol number, it’s not really true that it’s indicative of heart disease risk. You can have a high cholesterol number, but it’s really whether or not it’s oxidizing if it’s bad or not.  So taking antioxidants and keeping that oxidation from happening keeps your arteries open, the blood flowing, and reduces your risk of stroke and heart disease.

Well, obviously as we’ve been talking about all the things that oxidation causes in the body we want to have the antioxidants to stop these free radicals from causing this problem.

There are a number of different antioxidants. There’s vitamin a, vitamin c, e, vitamin d even, then we have polyphenols. We have whole groups of antioxidants and the truth is that all the antioxidants are very important because they don’t all do exactly the same job. Vitamin c stops some types of free radicals and vitamin e stops others. You need both of them.

They’re a byproduct of breathing and also of the stresses that happen to us. They’re kind of this fire that burns, that gives us life. They’re the smoke that comes off that fire. And it degrades the body.

Until recently, the focus has been on secondary antioxidants, things like vitamin a, e, c, polyphenols, etc. There are actually thousands of them. The primary antioxidants are SOD and Glutathione. The reason we haven’t heard much about these in the past is that they really aren’t something you can supplement with. There are a couple of companies in the marketplace that give you pills of SOD or Glutathione, however, all of the science indicates that you can’t take them via pill. When you put them in your body, the whole digestive process breaks them down and renders them useless. In one study they gave people 3,000 milligrams of Glutathione and it didn’t change their circulating levels of Glutathione in their blood at all. And so it’s not really something you could supplement with until recently.

Symmetry recently introduced X’tranol-24^TM, a triple patented ingredient, in Genesis^TM. The product has a patented layering technology that protects the SOD and the Glutathione. There are a number of studies that show that it increases the circulation of these in-blood plasma levels and that it gets into the body allowing them to work.

The way antioxidants have been measured recently is by an ORAC score; Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity test. I have a number of problems with this test. One of them is that this test only measures one thing. There are thousands of antioxidants that are important and there are thousands of free radicals that you want to destroy. This only measures the ability of an antioxidant to destroy one of them.

Depending on whatever juice you use, you’re measuring against one antioxidant. It could be a very good score or it could be a very poor score. But when you measure it against a different antioxidant or different free radical it could be completely different.

From the ORAC test they’ve developed an L-ORAC, and an H-ORAC, but the most important they’ve come out with is called the S-ORAC or Super ORAC test. This actually measures the super oxide or the Super Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity of primary antioxidants. When tested, Genesis^TM had a very good score, Ultra Vitality^TM had an amazing score, but even though they had a good score, that only measures against one thing. Now we’re measuring our S-ORAC and Genesis is really unsurpassed. We will inactivate billions of free radical molecules with one serving of Genesis with the new X’tranol-24^TM.

Resveratrol has been one of the main things we’ve talked about with Symmetry’s Genesis^TM over the last few years.  We’ve received a tremendous boost from the press lately. Resveratrol is found in pomegranates, grape skins, and grape seeds. There are several other fruits that have this, but the highest concentration is actually in wine. The fermentation process really concentrates resveratrol from the grape skins and seeds. We have standardized the resveratrol content in Genesis.

Resveratrol is a polyphenol, it’s an antioxidant, but much more important than the fact that it’s an antioxidant is that resveratrol activates the Sirt1 gene. This gene creates a domino effect. Once you’ve activated this gene it starts affecting all the systems in the body so that it can improve life span by 30 percent. In some species, they’ve tested it and there’s been as much as 50 percent and even 100 percent of an increase in lifespan. It can also help stop the replication of cancer and the flu virus. It’s good for weight loss, it controls blood sugar levels, and diabetes. It even helped stop the bird flu. The last I looked, there were over 80,000 published scientific research papers on resveratrol. One of the things that have been important with Genesis is that no matter how high an ORAC score you have or how many different antioxidants you have, that doesn’t have anything to do with resveratrol.  If it doesn’t have resveratrol in it you’re not going to activate the Sirt1 gene and get this domino effect that can help you live longer and be more healthy.

On my blog I posted a study that was published recently that found one of the most nutritious fruits is pomegranate. It won hands down. It beat all of the other fruits for its total combination of vitamins and minerals and antioxidants. Pomegranate is an amazing antioxidant and all around health beverage, and of course, it’s one of the major ingredients in Symmetry’s Genesis^TM.

Sometimes it’s hard to answer these questions because they can be very complex. It’s like comparing the difference between a Buick and a Chevy. They are two different things, but they can be similar. Resveratrol we already talked about. Ellagic acid is something that’s very high in pomegranate, it’s found in some other fruits as well. Ellagic acid has some very potent anti-cancer effects. It actually causes aptosis in cancer cells. It turns cancer cells off. And it has, in recent studies, proven to be very beneficial for the liver. It helps to detoxify the liver. They recommend to anybody that’s doing chemo or radiation therapy, to consume ellagic acid to protect the liver from damage. And of course, anybody that’s looking at detoxifying the liver as a whole should be looking at ellagic acid. So they’re both very beneficial but they are different and there are thousands of other antioxidants. You want to make sure that you are getting all of them. That’s what we try to give you, a broad spectrum of things in Ultra Vitality^TM and Genesis^TM.

This is about dosage. It’s important to realize that the dosage is for Joe Average and that if you’re not Joe Average, if you have something wrong with you that you’re trying to treat, you might want to take a little extra to get started. Then as that starts to make a difference in your body you can start to taper back. In the case of Genesis^TM, we talk about rather than using a bottle a month that you start out and use a bottle a week so you really get a saturation going. In some countries like the Philippines, physicians will put people on a bottle a day. Certainly, I would recommend that if you have a problem that you really want to address, you might want to start out and take a bottle every week to make sure you’re feeling better faster.

Hopefully, in some way, I’ve kind of addressed some of that as we’ve been going through this. We have standardized ingredients. Many of the products on the market, studies have shown, are no different than buying fruit punch at the grocery store because they are not standardizing any of the ingredients. They’re just putting some juices together. Our ellagic acid and resveratrol are standardized and now we have our triple-patented X’tranol-24^TM and so it makes our product very unique. There’s nothing like it in the marketplace.

Our products are made so you see a difference. Many of our products are much older than our company. These are thing I was making for my patients, family, and friends. I was using them for years when we started Symmetry. Because they had such good clinical results we brought them into Symmetry. That was years ago and we’re not done with them. We’re always working on improving them and making them better. Our customers see results and they see them quickly or they get their money back.

DeltaZorb^TM is a patented ingredient that we came up with. I started reading some research by Dr. James Duke, a pharmacognocist, who also worked for many years at the United States Department of Agriculture on pepperine. This is an ingredient that he found increased absorbability of nutrients across the gut wall and also has a very strong anti-cancer property. I started looking at other ingredients that kind of did that same thing. Then we merged these ingredients together and we have a patented ingredient called DeltaZorb. We have white papers that show this, you can download these from the website. They show that when you take DeltaZorb with any nutrients you get up to 160 percent more absorption. How can you get 160 percent of 100 percent? You can’t get more than what is in there and that’s true. The thing is that nobody ever absorbs 100 percent of what you give them. The study shows how much of 100 milligrams of vitamin c, taken by itself, would get into your blood system? Tomorrow we give you 100 milligrams of vitamin c plus DeltaZorb^TM and it gets 160 percent more into your system. And, it does that with all the nutrients and so the real benefit of having DeltaZorb^TM in our products isn’t only that you are going to get more Symmetry nutrition in your body, but when you take the products with breakfast, lunch, and dinner you’re also going to get more nutrition out of breakfast lunch and dinner. How good is that?

Sodium Benzoate is a workhorse in the nutrition industry. It has been used for years and it has a stellar safety issue report. It is a preservative. Anytime you have something like Genesis^TM that’s a liquid product and you open it up, you expose it to air, somebody drinks out of the bottle, you have to make sure that it’s not going to go bad. We use less than 0.01%. We’re actually using hundredths of a percent. It’s a very little amount. Some people are concerned about the use of vitamin c and sodium benzoate forming something called benzene. You just have to know a little bit about basic chemistry to understand that’s never a problem. That’s only a problem in soft drinks. When you have soft drinks, the sodium benzoate that they use is in a higher percentage and there’s little or no vitamin c. When that little bit of vitamin c reacts with the sodium benzoate it forms benzene. However, when that ratio is reversed as in Genesis^TM where you have a higher amount of vitamin c and only a trace of benzene that chemical reaction can’t happen. You cannot form benzene. It’s perfectly safe and of course we’ve had this product on the market for years and there’s never been one safety issue ever.

JAMA and Harvard Researchers Recommend Vitamin Supplements.

After 30 years of viewing the use of vitamin supplements as unnecessary, the American medical establishment has reversed itself and is beginning to recommend that all Americans need to supplement to remain healthy.

For over a quarter of a century the American medical establishment fought against the use of supplements but several years ago, after thousands upon thousands of studies,  finally reversed themselves and they now recommend that all adults take a nutritional supplement daily.

Here, in part, is what the Harvard medical school researchers said:

"Vitamin deficiency syndromes such as scurvy and beriberi are uncommon in Western societies. However, suboptimal intake of some vitamins, above levels causing classic vitamin deficiency, is a risk factor for chronic diseases and common in the general population, especially the elderly.

Suboptimal folic acid levels, along with suboptimal levels of vitamins B(6) and B(12), are a risk factor for cardiovascular disease, neural tube defects, and colon and breast cancer; low levels of vitamin D contribute to osteopenia and fractures; and low levels of the antioxidant vitamins (vitamins A, E, and C) may increase risk for several chronic diseases.

Most people do not consume an optimal amount of all vitamins by diet alone. It appears prudent for all adults to take vitamin supplements.'"

From: the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA,2002, 287:3116-3126)