The Evolution of Vitamins: From The Stone Age to The Space Age

“Updating to a liposomal supplement is like making the switch from a rotary phone to the iPhone 6.”

To really grasp just how incredible liposomal technology is, it will help you to have some perspective on where it came from.

Approaching the middle of the 19th century, in the heart of France, two men began quietly experimenting with a medicine dropper, gelatin and an iron tray, to invent the first vitamin pill known to the modern world.

The year was 1834, and Joseph Dublanc, alongside François Mothès, had lit the fuse to set off an explosion of what would someday be a 60 billion dollar a year industry: nutritional supplements.

Almost 200 years have passed, and the majority of our vitamins are still being made using the same basic, primitive method. The simple idea was to mask the taste of the medicinal chemicals which doctors would give to their patients, in the form of an easy-to-swallow tablet.

Any soft gel capsule you’ll find on the shelves of drugstores today is made using the exact same concept as we used back then, only with more complex chemicals and additives.

Now, the most common choice to encapsulate vitamins is a hard tablet of cellulose – a fibre found in plants, and most commonly borrowed from one of our biggest crops: genetically modified corn.

It wasn’t until the electron microscope became widely used through the 1950’s and 60’s that a British blood scientist, Alec Bangham, would discover a radical new possibility.

What if we mimicked the structure of our own cells to create a completely new way to encapsulate medicine? Something so small that the naked eye cannot see it; so familiar to the body that nearly every last molecule is absorbed and used by the parts that need it most?

And so, we innovated the future of medicine: the ‘liposome’.

Though 50 years have passed since that discovery, liposomal technology is only just breaking into the supplement market. This slow progress has nothing to do with the legitimacy of the technology, since heaps of scientific articles have already confirmed its miraculous benefits, but everything to do the established business structures and manufacturing processes of the giants in the vitamin supplement industry – which are lucratively profitable.

Simply put: it’s easier and cheaper to keep producing a heavily processed supplement from refined GMO products than it is to upgrade to new systems and create a far superior product.

This same suppressive dynamic was seen in the 1990’s when auto-makers sabotaged the release and sale of the electric car. With immense financial interest in the livelihood of fossil fuel companies, as well as thousands of automotive factories across the US alone, they could not afford for this new alternative to be adopted by the public as it would thwart their success and cashflow.

With all of the mind-blowing technological advancements we humans have made over the years, it’s about time we saw a drastic change in something so increasingly urgent as dietary supplements. Increasing environmental toxicity from pollution and decreasing nutrient content in our agricultural products are just a few of the profound reasons why we need more modern vitamin solutions now more than ever.

After all, the telephone was invented years after the first vitamin pill, but look at how much progress it has seen in comparison! Given that we’re highly social creatures, I suppose it’s only natural that our priorities have been elsewhere.

But if you’re interested in the therapeutic benefits of vitamin C, I strongly urge you to re-consider its conventional forms. Updating to a liposomal supplement is like making the switch from a rotary phone to the iPhone 6.

It’s high time that we take full advantage of modern science to support the body’s natural intelligence. Vitamins, welcome to the 21st century!