The Vitamin Code

The tale of Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, a professor who was likely to be spotted on campus either riding a bike or playing soccer with students, illustrates how raw nutrition transitioned from Hungary before World War II to the modern-day, in which many people want to get bodily health. Szent-Györgyi would have seemed to anybody walking down the street in 1930s Hungary as the epitome of free-wheeling.

Fun-loving? Sure. People listened to him because he was well-respected for his approach to lecturing, having MD status, and being involved in medical research that brought him to the forefront of efforts globally to identify the vitamin in citrus that healed sailors suffering from scurvy within a week.

Because of his work at the Szent-Györgyi Laboratories, Szent-Györgyi isolated “hexuronic acid” from citrus juices. This supplement has been proven to assist people who have scurvy-like symptoms when it is added to meals and tested on guinea pigs. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1937 for “his discoveries relating to the biological combustion processes, in particular the catalytic activity of fumaric acid.”

Powerful Co-Factors

When everything was said and done, the whole picture was really rather extraordinary. Szent-Gyorgyi isolated a “hexuronic acid” that had significant problems. Concentrated sugars that were difficult to remove from citrus hindered purification. For Szent-Györgyi, finding a superior dietary supply of vitamin C was a huge challenge. When his wife was preparing supper, his response arrived at the dinner table. On the other hand, lost in the mix of it all was another major finding, this one with much wider ramifications. Many problems with the “hexuronic acid” Szent-Gyorgyi isolated were discovered. There were difficult-to-remove sugars in citrus, which hampered purification. For Szent-Györgyi, finding a superior dietary supply of vitamin C was a huge challenge. When his wife was preparing supper, his response arrived at the dinner table.

After identifying and isolating as much vitamin C as he needed, Szent-Gyorgyi was able to harvest and process a purer form of vitamin C that he called “hexuronic acid. He coined the moniker “ascorbic acid” for this new, more pure type of vitamin C. (from the Latin term for scurvy, ascorbutus). Today, pure vitamin C is still known as ascorbic acid.

This purification process included going through many stages in order to extract ascorbic acid from the paprika. For Szent-Gyorgyi, the careful scientist, each one of these steps was tried on patients with vitamin C deficiency-related disorders. The discovery surprised him.

As the ascorbic acid grew purer and purer, patients’ recovery would also improve; he anticipated 100% ascorbic acid to result in the quickest recovery. The facts above were not accurate. There was a negligible impact on the 100% pure ascorbic acid. Between raw food and 100% whole, the biggest impact was created while it was at the purification stage.

According to Szent-Györgyi, the intermediary stage includes additional components that further support vitamin C’s actions. He was of the opinion that they were “flavones.” The term “bioflavonoids” is often used nowadays to refer to these compounds, which are called “isoflavonoids” in certain other countries.

Many of the food business professionals at the time believed that chemicals separated vitamins were more helpful to health than whole foods.

Interruption by War

At the start of World War II, Hungarian Resistance Leader Szent-Györgyi took on the important task of assisting Jews to escape death camps and transporting secret communications to the British Secret Service. His efforts drew the notice of Hitler, and that achievement brought him an invitation to meet the Führer. Fearing for his life, Szent-Györgyi and his wife left the city during their stay. During the war, they stayed in locations where the Gestapo dared not go since the war was not yet over. After the war, he immigrated to the U.S. after receiving the Nobel Prize for literature. While he was still at it, he had moved on to other things (in 1954 he won the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award for cardiovascular disease research).

Code Breaker

In a way, what he couldn’t anticipate was how much his message influenced a young guy who attended one of his talks. Dr. Endre “Andy” Szalay saw Dr. Szent-Györgyi as a hero, and since he drew inspiration from the ideas of Dr. Szent-Györgyi, he was going to cure Vitamin Code one day.

Many individuals have specific, traumatic events in their lives that have been imprinted in their memory banks, helping them to focus on their goals. In Andy Szalay’s estimation, Albert Szent-lectures Gyorgyi’s consisted of a mixture of anecdotes, teachings, and insights. Not only was Andy Szalay able to recapture the events, but his work ethic shows that it would take decades for him to achieve his objective.

Andy did not want to be a scientist when he was younger. Early in his youth, he dedicated himself to become a competitive swimmer. During the summer, he would swim all day. For the rest of the year, he would train from 6 to 8 a.m. and from 6 to 8 p.m. each evening.

Andy devoted himself to his work at the University of Szeged in Hungary, where Szent-Gyorgyi also conducted research and lectured. However, although Szent-Gyorgyi never saw or talked with him, his teachings affected Andy profoundly. Even to this day, he carries a torn book that he has read from beginning to end many times.

Andy went on to become a pharmacist after finishing university in Szeged, Hungary in 1943. Obviously, in 1943, Hungary was hardly a desirable place to be.

Many a night was spent cowering in cellars as bombs were dropped due to the large German presence in the nation and Russian forces reacting to it. In the aftermath of the war, the Russian Soviet government dominated Hungary and was in a class of its own. He fled (literally through a hole in a fence) and eventually ended himself in the United States in 1956.

He started climbing the corporate ladder at three separate botanical/pharmaceutical businesses during the following two decades. Despite earning respect from his supervisors, they could not bring themselves to give him the freedom to pursue a notion that had been incubating in his brain since he first discovered the work of Szent-Gyorgyi.

So, it had been 15 years since Andy had first started working for the third business when he decided to make a choice that most people would never be able to face. Andy decided to leave his job at the age of 57, and that same year, he established his own business. Andy made his first major break by founding Grow Company, Inc.

Reverse-Engineering

So, what was Andy’s concept, which he attempted to disseminate to three other firms previously? The formula is as simple as Szent-Gyorgyi found.

He discovered an “intermediate” stage in which the isolated vitamin C was more efficient than the 100% pure isolated vitamin C. Andy’s main goal was to figure out a method to re-create the process and deliver a 100% isolated version of vitamin C from the “intermediate” stage.

He had an idea of how to do it. He needed nothing more than a glance out his window to be inspired. After planting a seed, the roots of the plant begin to draw out the inorganic salts in the soil. Co-factors are created during the metabolic process of the plant, via which sunlight causes leaf and fruit production, in conjunction with helpful soil organisms. Every nutrient, nutrient mineral, phytonutrient, and phytochemical is grown in the production process.

Thus, Andy’s hypothesis may be summarized like this. While Szent-Gyorgyi extracted vitamins from their natural state, he discovered that vitamin potency reached its peak in a “intermediate” stage. While following the natural process, Andy sought to get the isolated vitamin to an “intermediate” stage.

Proteins and peptides

However, even though the idea was quite easy, applying it was difficult.

Before Andy could grow a plant, he first required a growing medium. He tried various yeast strains and finally decided to use baker’s yeast, which was available at every grocery shop. baker’s yeast is a single-celled organism that thrives in a hydroponic environment (in water). It feeds on water and grows through division, starting with one cell and increasing in size, then to two, then to four, and so on.

Baker’s yeast also provided Andy with a significant advantage, which demonstrated that he was headed in the correct direction. Andy discovered that proteins and smaller chained peptides that were injected into yeast cells resulted in the penetration of the cell walls and the establishment of a physical connection. The yeast was able to prevent the vitamins and minerals from entering the cell.

While it did not take in any nutrients because of the lack of penetration, the newly produced yeast did not have that vitamin or mineral incorporated in it.

When Andy made the decision to first include vitamin or mineral with a protein or peptide, and then use the yeast to propagate it, this was his “eureka moment. Peptides are short, protein-rich chains containing two amino acids, which are used to digest or to be digested.

If Andy learned that each vitamin and mineral has its own unique proteins or peptides, they would have this concept reinforced as they learned about each having its own distinct protein or peptide which is able to penetrate through the yeast cell wall and incorporate into the yeast. In order to treat different nutrient deficiencies, each one required a unique “universal” protein or peptide. To get these codes, he would have to understand the rules of nature.

Undaunted, Andy began to look for the amino acid sequence for one mineral, this time selenium. For Andrew, there was no method to identify the particular protein or peptide in yeast cells that allowed selenium to enter, so he started his research the traditional way—by trial and error. Even though he was anticipating the results, he was nevertheless astonished when he cracked the code. To anticipate the selenium passing through the yeast cell wall, the peptide he employed helped the peptide with selenium pass through the yeast cell wall. Using the scientific process, Andy had successfully placed an inorganic isolated mineral (selenium) in a food source (yeast). With this increase in selenium, yeast was produced in which selenium is essential. The coding factor he initially reverse-engineered was of the natural kind. The intermediate phase Szent-Gyorgyi outlined was now underway.

When Andy started, he set out to find all of the peptides and proteins that were required to produce all of the key vitamins and minerals. Thousands of tests were performed, and if a failure occurred, it had to be cleaned up and the process had to be started all over again. For Andy, who had performed an action that would have pleased his literary hero, it had been a big day: he had shattered the Vitamin Code.

Code Factors

During the process of growing, code factors are generated. We are frequently fixated on vitamins and minerals when it comes to nutrition. Oranges are an excellent source of vitamin C. Like carrots, spinach is an excellent source of beta-carotene. Your body transforms beta-carotene to vitamin A, thus, foods high in beta-carotene are also excellent sources of vitamin A. Yogurt is an excellent source of calcium. This is correct, however raw and cultured foods really have high nutritional value. Grated orange peel, baby spinach, and Greek yogurt are a lot more difficult to consume than one specific vitamin or mineral. Vitamins and minerals are only a few of the thousands of co-factors included in the blend.

The nutritional effect of these co-factors is reduced by isolating the vitamins and minerals from them. The individual vitamins and minerals in Vitamin Code multivitamins come with Code Factors: enzymes, antioxidants, fatty acids, and phytonutrients. These co-factors are inherent to the process, not added afterward. The method utilized to produce these vitamins and minerals supplies Code Factors in much the same way that a plant grows in a farmer’s field.

Garden of Life sees the potential in using the whole spectrum of raw nutrition and the Vitamin Code and has made a strong recipe for health available to everyone.

multivitamin Unheated and unadulterated RAW formulations are gluten- and GMO-free and are never heated beyond 118 degrees F. Raw One Multivitamins, protein powders, meal replacements, cleansing programs, bone builders, and supplements such as vitamin C, B complex D, E are included in the company’s product range.