Why natural ingredients?

With BERTRAND, all nutrients come from high-quality natural sources such as grains, oilseeds, almonds, nuts, berries, and other natural ingredients of organic quality, and our product meets the European reference values for nutrients. Other manufacturers, such as Soylent, use synthetically produced vitamins and achieve the same goal. So what speaks in favor of naturalness?

The answer is simple: We want a product that is as complete as possible. With BERTRAND, we have created a product whose composition makes it possible to live on it for extended periods. However, this presupposes that the formulation has been designed to provide the body with an optimal supply of all the necessary nutrients. This premise can be regarded as generally accepted, and it is also shared by manufacturers of synthetic products.

The perspective of manufacturers of synthetic products such as Soylent differs from that of our company at the point where a statement is made about the current state of nutritional science. The idea is currently gaining ground on the market that human nutrition has been researched down to the last detail and that all essential nutrients are therefore known. These very essential nutrients are also found in the manufacturers’ formulations. They may be of synthetic origin, but they are there.

However, nutrition science itself is far less enthusiastic when it comes to assessing the extent of its own knowledge. Like other sciences, nutrition science will generate new knowledge over time. Over time, additional nutrients will be classified as essential, and the current nutritional recommendations will be replaced by new ones. In light of this observation, it is therefore not wise to choose as a regular food product one that consists of isolated, synthetically produced vitamins and minerals.

But is BERTRAND really different in this respect? Our product also formally meets only the current EU reference values, and naturally we cannot incorporate knowledge that will emerge in the future into our recipe. What makes our product special, however, is that it does not consist of isolated synthetic nutrients, but of nutrient-rich ingredients that people have largely been consuming for centuries and whose effects on the body have been very well researched. We use grains, oilseeds, mushrooms, various nuts, algae, berries, and other ingredients in certified organic quality. If ongoing research eventually identifies new nutrients as significant, then they will almost certainly also be found in the ingredient groups mentioned above. And therefore in BERTRAND as well.

The processes involving synthetic vitamins and minerals in the body have been researched to a lesser extent, and nutritionists generally recommend not consuming additional vitamins or minerals in synthetic form.

In our view, there is only one argument in favor of synthetic vitamins in food, and it primarily benefits the manufacturer: They are inexpensive to produce.