Why microbeads as nutrition?

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Microbeads are the platform we have chosen to deliver our nutrients. This form factor solves issues associated with most other nutrient delivery systems (pills, powders, capsules, liquids, etc.) and provides the basis for precision-personalized formulas.

TL;DR –

We chose microbeads to deliver our nutrients
Only way to precisely personalize the formulas
It always ensures optimal nutrient absorption

But first, what is our competition doing? – Most companies in the “personalized health” space exclusively rely on legacy pills and capsules to deliver their nutrients. As a company enters the space, this is the alluring choice for business reasons. Pills and capsules have an immense supply chain, are inexpensive, and customers are familiar with taking this form factor.

Power of personalisation

Problems: Pills and capsules

The largest failure of these delivery systems is that they do not allow for the personalization of the nutrient doses. In other words, the doses of nutrients are fixed and the same for each customer; you either get a standard dose of a nutrient in your pack – or you do not.
While this is typically acceptable for initially correcting a nutrient deficiency, once the level of the said nutrient is corrected a personalized dose is essential to keep you in the optimal range. The standard dose you were receiving may fall short of what you need for optimal daily health and fail to keep you in the optimal range – or the dose may be more than you need and while it rapidly brought you out of a deficiency, it will keep your levels too high.
In summary, pills and capsules only provide “all or none” personalization and fail to provide finely tuned dosing that is essential to establish and maintain optimal nutrient levels.

Problems: Liquids and powders

As pill- and capsule-based companies recognize the inadequacies of these systems, they often turn to liquids and powders to provide more custom dosing. Nutrient stability, formulation stability, and absorption are the issues present with liquids and powders.
Liquids are…wet. In an aqueous environment, vitamins and minerals can react with each other and break down. Powders, a cost-effective and easy method of personalization, has an issue due to the particle size of each nutrient. Whether these sizes are due to the difference in the chemical structure of the nutrient or the differing manufacturing standards of the various suppliers, powders have the tendency to separate over time, creating layers of disproportionate levels of each nutrient. Larger particles will shift towards the bottom while nutrients with smaller particles will rise to the top, leading to inaccurate doses when the user scoops their daily dose. In some cases, this can lead to dangerous overdosing of nutrients.
Both powders and liquids suffer from the poor taste of nutrients, which requires the addition of flavouring substances to the mixture. Finally, both powders and liquids deliver nutrients rapidly into the bloodstream. While companies often take advantage of this “fast-acting” nature for marketing, the rapid delivery of nutrients into the gastrointestinal tract (and eventually the bloodstream) can result in poor nutrient absorption and poor blood nutrient level maintenance throughout the day.

Introducing microbeads

To solve the issues of legacy nutrient delivery systems, we have chosen to build our platform on microbead technology. Although microbeads are more expensive to develop and require a huge upfront investment in machinery to manufacture & personalize formulas – the benefits these beads provide are well worth it.

Precision Personalization

Microbeads provide hyper-personalization. Each nutrient can be dosed to the milligram or microgram. Fine-tuning every nutrient in a customer’s formula ensures that an optimal nutrient range is achieved and maintained over time. In fact, our microbeads provide more than 700,000,000,000,000+ possible nutrient combinations, so that you get the exact nutrients you need, at the precise doses to best support your cells.

Optimal Nutrient Absorption

Pills, capsules, powders, and liquids all rapidly deposit the full dose of the nutrient into your gastrointestinal system. This can result in nausea and reduce the absorption of nutrients; a large bolus of a single nutrient can overwhelm absorption channels. In addition, certain nutrients (e.g. zinc and calcium) use the same absorption channels and directly compete for absorption, thus reducing total nutrient absorption. Finally, depending on when the nutrients are taken in relation to fat-containing food, fat-soluble nutrients can have limited absorption.
Microbeads address these problems with their slow-release matrix. With an average dissolution rate of 10-12 hours, the nutrients are gradually released into the gastrointestinal tract throughout the day. This prevents absorption channels from being overwhelmed. In addition, each nutrient is packaged in its own microbeads, which space the nutrients out in the intestine and reduce absorption channel competition between contraindicated nutrients. Finally, fat-soluble nutrients are released from their microbeads in the presence of fat which increases absorption.

Extended Blood Level Maintenance

The slow-release nature of the microbeads also helps to maintain optimal blood nutrient levels throughout the day. Certain nutrients (e.g. vitamin C) have mechanisms to regulate the level in the blood, and large elevations of nutrients in the blood are removed rapidly. Microbeads provide a steady drip of nutrients into the bloodstream which helps to keep these blood nutrient levels within an optimal range for a longer duration, leading to optimal nutrient distribution and tissue saturation.

Added Fiber

Adding dietary fibre to your diet has been correlated to improved health. While complex food-based fibres are the most beneficial, the slow-release matrix of our microbeads provides between 4-8 grams of fibre per day (depending on the customer’s specific formulation).

Clean Delivery

Many supplements include “other” (i.e. non-nutritive) ingredients in the product, from flow- and anti-caking agents to preservatives to artificial colours and sweeteners. Our microbeads represent the cleanest delivery system, using only the raw nutrient + pharmaceutical-grade cellulose and starch (this comprises the slow-release matrix) + a sustainably farmed beeswax coating.

Nutrient Sourcing

Our nutrient sourcing and microbead development are led by Dr Daniel Wallerstorfer PhD & a team of health professionals, nutrient intensivists, and supply chain specialists.

Nutrient Forms: Rootine is a research-based company and we always default to offering nutrients and choosing nutrient forms, that have the most clinical evidence supporting safe and efficacious use in humans. While we perform the majority of new nutrient investigation internally, we also follow EFSA (European Food and Safety Agency) recommendations and claims approvals. EFSA approves and denies nutrient claims based on the totality of the evidence, and is extremely strict in its rulings. “EFSA is the highest authority of nutrient claims I am aware of and more comprehensive than anything from the FDA.” – Dr Daniel Wallerstorfer PhD. We continually audit our suite of nutrients and update nutrient forms when sufficient evidence has shown the safe and efficacious nature of a form. Examples of this include updating magnesium to trimagnesium citrate, iron to iron bisglycinate, and zinc to zinc bisglycinate.
Nutrient Suppliers: Dr Wallerstorfer has established relationships with the most reputable nutrient suppliers worldwide over the past 10 years. thus we source nutrients globally based on raw material quality, sourcing standards for environmental impact, and manufacturing practices. All incoming raw materials are tested for purity, potency, heavy metals, and bacteriology. In addition, the finished microbeads undergo rigorous testing. Even with long-standing nutrient supplier relationships, raw materials and finished products are tested to ensure that no raw materials ever makes it into a member’s hands without undergoing testing to ensure you are receiving a pure, potent, safe, and efficacious product.

Natural vs. Synthetic

Approximately 80% of our nutrients are of natural origin and 20% are synthetically produced. There is much (often misguided or reductionist) debate over natural vs. synthetic nutrients. There is no blanket statement that details one sourcing/production method to be superior to the other.

In some cases, the natural product is superior. An example is vitamin E, where the natural form (designated by d-) tends to offer superior benefits in trials compared to the natural form (designated by dl-).
In other cases, the synthetic product has unique properties that are not found in the comparable natural form (or cannot be effectively extracted). An example is a folate (vitamin B9), specifically methylfolate, which is a synthetically produced type of vitamin B9 that is bioactive in the body. For people with MTHFR gene mutations who cannot effectively activate food-based folates into the bioactive form, this synthetic version of folate is far superior.
And diving even deeper, there are instances where the natural form and synthetic form of a nutrient both exist and offer similar benefits but one is extraordinarily expensive to produce or extremely destructive to the environment.