Vitamins have notoriously been difficult to judge. Studies on their effectiveness have been inconclusive and it seems that broad, one-size-fits-all vitamins are limited in their ability to enhance personal health.
When you think about it, it makes sense. Your body is 100% unique; why should the same vitamin that "works" for everyone else, also work for you?
The simple answer is that it shouldn't. That's why a few notable startups have leaped headfirst into a new frontier for vitamins: creating custom vitamins aimed at addressing a customer's unique health needs.
It makes sense. Understanding a person's genetic and health make up is the missing link to understanding what they need from a vitamin.
How Does it Work?
Companies like ditto, Vitagene, and LifeDNA make custom vitamins by recording the health information of their customers and using that information to make a vitamin that targets their unique health needs.
But as it turns out, not all custom vitamins are created equal and it comes down to the ways in which these companies collect health and genetic information.
The latter two mentioned use DNA testing to produce their personalized vitamins, basing the science on the needs of a customer in accordance with their genetic profile. Ditto, on the other hand, uses a blood test to get the information it needs to produce a targeted, custom vitamin.
The question is, which method is better?
Blood Tests Are Better than DNA Tests
This is because of the amount of information that's shown by each different test. Sure, DNA tests will yield unique results. After all, your genetic makeup is fundamentally different than literally everyone else on earth. But DNA tests don't show the unique nutritional needs that aren't connected to genetic traits.
Let's imagine, you don't get enough magnesium in your diet, a crucial nutrient that helps regulate a wide variety of systems in your body. If you're having a vitamin formulated just for you, and you have a magnesium deficiency, you'd want that custom vitamin to contain optimal levels of magnesium, right?
Of course. But here's the problem. DNA testing won't detect this deficiency, and when your custom vitamin is made by a company using your DNA, you won't get a vitamin that targets the things it needs to target.
This is because DNA is static. Your genes the day you're born won't tell a DNA test anything different than your genes at 50 years old.
Blood tests, on the other hand, are dynamic. They recognize deficiencies in nutrients, as well as genetic risk factors. Companies like ditto take the most possible, current information about your health, and use it to create personalized vitamins that actually target your unique health and wellness needs.
The Bottom Line
Not only are ditto vitamins more effectively targeted to your needs, ditto re-tests every third month of your subscription. Instead of having one custom vitamin made that becomes outdated, it's more like ditto vitamins track the results and change based on your progress. This is only possible when using blood tests as the selected method of information gathering.
It's said that blood is thicker than water. Today, we found out why blood is more accurate than DNA when it comes to creating custom vitamins for your changing health needs.
