Post #48 Vitamins; Multivitamins, & Making Them

I am not a professional dietician or nutritionist; nor do I manufacture any vitamin supplements; the following includes some of my own beginner (layperson) thoughts/conclusions (& this time a few surmises/guesses) which I am happy to share after some of my internet research.

Do you (too) take vitamin & mineral supplements? I have for decades. I may have taken it for granted a little that we can just go to the store & purchase them. That has been possible for only a short time in history; about 75 years. Before that, I understand that (many?) people suffered from vitamin deficiency diseases.

Wikipedia info. advised me that:  “All the vitamins were discovered between 1913 & 1948”. & “In the 1950s [began] the mass production & marketing of vitamin supplements. So vitamin supplements (many of us believe) were big health progress.

Lately I became quite curious about my multivitamin tablets. Specifically, there are quite tiny amounts each of so many ingredients in one tablet … so how do they quality control that? How, for instance, do they ensure that there is e.g. 4mg. of a certain ingredient in each & every tablet…. ?

I went searching for the answer, hoping to find a specific YouTube video showing how this is done. I did not succeed to find that, but I have come to some fairly logical (I hope) conclusions. I did find YouTube videos generally showing commercial (mass) vitamin tablet production & the machines for doing same. There are metal trays that resemble teeny tiny muffin tins. The ingredients are inserted into the “muffin”/tablet holes, & then pressed into tablets.

I think the only way to quality control to get such tiny amounts into each & every tablet:  is to have filling dispenser machines that physically match up to the muffin holes, that dispense each tiny amount into each muffin hole. I am guessing the muffin tins proceed down a conveyer belt & stop under each dispenser machine to have the next ingredient dispensed into the holes. Until all the ingredients are inserted. Then the tablets are pressed.

Apart from mass production machines (creating up to 1 million tablets an hour if I remember correctly…) one can purchase home use trays to make our own vitamin tablets (e.g. a tray big enough to make 200 tablets at a time). & there are YouTube videos with instructions how to go about it.

It has been estimated that a consumer might save up to 90% of the store cost of some tablets by creating/pressing our own. Well, after all the supplements I have bought, I wish I had known about & had that option available to me decades ago!