Chug Your Vitamins

By Jolene Thym

Multivitamins. Calcium for bones. Vitamin B for stress. Vitamin C for a cold. Flax oil for immunity. Probiotics for digestion. Melatonin for sleep. Herbs for stress, antioxidants for wrinkles, glucosamine for joints.

If that pile of pills is too much to swallow, there is an option, says Kerry Kirk of AgroLabs in New Jersey.

“For people who don’t like to swallow pills, we tell them to just drink an ounce,” she says, referring to her company’s line of one- ounce-a-day elixirs that are formulated to cure just about anything that ails.

“The fact is that so many people don’t like to take pills,” she says. “This is a convenient way for them to get the nutrients without having to choke down pills.”

AgroLabs’ line includes such products as Cardio Support, Green Envy Daily Detox, Recall It and Peaceful Sleep.

“Part of it is that the baby boomers are getting a little older and they want to stay healthy,” she says. “Their eyesight begins to go, maybe they aren’t sleeping well or they’re forgetting where they put their car keys. They don’t like the idea of pill-popping because it makes them feel old.”

The concept of liquid supplements, says Tom Vierhile of Datamonitor’s Productscan Online, was born about four years ago, at the height of antioxidant awareness. Since then, dozens of companies have jumped on the idea, creating a landslide of new liquid health solutions using superfruit juices as their base. Some are juice only; others are fortified with specific minerals, vitamins, herbs and extracts. All are pretty pricey — often as much as $2 per one- ounce serving.

“The trend started with pomegranate, then acai,” Vierhile says. “Now it’s expanding to include mangosteen and goji berries. This is like the new generation of superfruits.”

Although most of the juice products are primarily promoted through heath and fitness Web sites, some have caught some high- profile attention — Acai Amazon Thunder was featured on “Oprah” and continues to be promoted by Nicholas Perricone, author of “The Perricone Promise: Look Younger, Live Longer in Three Easy Steps.” Purple, another acai supplement, is being touted by Chaka Khan and featured on “The View.”

Although experts warn against believing that these juice-based supplements are a fountain of youth, JoAnn Hall of Fremont is convinced that the reason the supplements have caught on is that they work. She takes MonaVie, a concentrated blend of juices, daily.

“I was taking a total of 11 different supplements, trying to put into my body artificially what I was not doing naturally,” she says. “Since I have been drinking MonaVie, I now take my calcium and one omega-3 capsule and that is it.

“I am taking MonaVie Active which is the one with glucosamine (a supplement for joints). I just had a total knee replacement done on my right knee on Friday and I am already walking without the aid of a walker,” says Hall. “Do I think MonaVie had anything to do with such a rapid recovery? Absolutely.”

Hall is so impressed with the physical results of drinking the juice that she became a MonaVie vendor herself. Besides the health benefits, she says she also gets a kick out of the one-ounce-per- day prescription, which she generally chugs straight out of the bottle.

“You have to realize that MonaVie comes in bottle that looks like wine,” she says. “I was in my kitchen taking my dose one day and I looked up to see two women walking down the street staring at me. I was so embarrassed that I chased them down the street to explain.”

Those kind of testimonials, says Kirk of AgroLabs, are so common that even though her company just introduced seven new products, more new elixirs are on the way.

“We see liquid supplements as the future of health product marketing,” she says. “Basically, our goal is to create a product to address any health issue that people might have.”

As the market for such liquid health solutions expands, Vierhile of Productscan Online expects to see a lot more research into the health claims. “Antioxidants are really popular right now, but eventually we’re going to have to get to the bottom of what is real and what isn’t in terms of the claims,” he says.

“I would say that people are quick to grab things that claim to be good for you, but I’m not sure how many people really understand what antioxidants are and why they are good for them.”

Among the issues that will likely be addressed in the future, he says, is the accuracy of ORAC values, a scale that’s designed to measure the antioxidant value.

“The problem is,” he says, “that there is no one source for the numbers, and there is wild disagreement about it.”

Vierhile, who spends a lot of time monitoring the comings and goings of products on the market, isn’t convinced that the liquid health supplement market is anything more than a fad.

“I think that there’s a lot of novelty value to some of these,” he says. “The problem is that they don’t taste very good. Pomegranate tastes good, but the others? Some of them taste like Robitussin. Frankly, I’m surprised how far they’ve gone already. People are interested in good health, but they just aren’t going to stick with something that tastes bad.”

Reach Jolene Thym at 510-353-7008 or at jthym@bayareanewsgroup.com.

Originally published by Jolene Thym, Oakland Tribune.

(c) 2008 Oakland Tribune. Provided by ProQuest LLC. All rights Reserved.