How to tell if your multivitaminis worth its salt

There are a number of rules of thumb that your can follow to know if you have made a good choice in a multivitamin. Leading on from yesterday's post about copper and its bioavailability, copper is involved in one of these rules of thumb.

Read your multivitamin label, (hopefully before you buy it). Follow these simple steps

• If it contains no copper then don't buy it.
• Does it contain copper oxide, this can be written as chemical formula as CuO or CuO₂. If so don't buy it, cause you cannot absorb this type of copper
• Is it a copper salt, this would be things such as copper chloride, copper sulphate, copper carbonate. In chemical terms this is CuCl, CuSO₄ CuCO_3. Copper salts is the minimum standard for purchasing a multivitamin
  
• It is even better if it is a copper chelate. For example copper gluconate, copper glycinate, and others, sometimes they are written as amino acid chelate, or amino acid bound to copper.
  

Some place in my filling system there is a paper that investigated copper in American multivitamins. It talked about why copper was important eg we have a low intacke, then it looked at what was on the market. If my memory is correct about 30% didn't have any copper, 30% had copper oxide(s) which cannot be absorbed. The remaining had either copper salts of copper chelates.

So this provides a very good rule of thumb.