The way in which nutritional substances are presented to the body may be divided into four groups; food, in isolated chemical form, as amino acid chelates and as Re-natured nutrients.

Food is the obvious, dominant group - there is no better way to obtain all nutrients required than from food, the vegetables and fruit which we consume obtain nutrients from the soil and so consumption of food should be sufficient for nutritional requirements.

However, in recent years, the nutritional value of food sources has decreased due to various factors such as less or no crop rotation, erosion of the top soil, pollution and the use of pesticides and herbicides.  As a result, supplementation of the food which comprises our diet, with vitamins and minerals, has become a common route to replenish and ensure adequate intake of these micronutrients.

For supplementation purposes, however, the majority of the 13 recognised vitamins cannot be successfully isolated in a stable form.  In order for them to be technologically stable they are converted to salts such as thiamin mononitrate (vitamin B₁) or pyridoxine hydrochloride (vitamin B₆).  These forms are not found in nature.  In addition, for commercial necessity, many vitamins are chemically synthesised to produce a pure isolate by processes which have little connection with food.

The same problem is found with the minerals where the sources used for the fortification of foods are mainly inorganic or organic salts of the minerals.  These chemical isolated minerals and vitamins, although produced to enable an adequate intake of the nutrients, especially for those at risk of deficiency, do not come close to the efficiency of food in providing the body with nutrients in an easily accessibly form.  Hence the development of the amino acid chelates and Re-Natured nutrients, which are ways of trying to present the micronutrients to the body in a form as close to food as possible.

The micronutrients provided by the amino acid chelates are more available for the body to utilise compared to the isolated chemical forms due to the micronutrient in question being complexed with amino acids, which are the building blocks of proteins in food. 

Bio-Natured nutrients, however, progress closer still to efficiency of food in terms of enabling the body to utilise the nutrients.  The vitamins and mineral from this form possess a high utilisation rate by the body, the resulting efficiency being very close to that of food.  The reason is that these nutrients are so close to food and its components as they can possibly be.

The following graph demonstrates the potential of the above categories.  Bio-natured nutrients contain all of the food factors and ingredients which bring it as close as possible to the natural food state.  Although food is always the best means of obtaining all nutritional requirements, if grown on appropriate soil under certain conditions, the second best has to be Bio-natured Food form nutrients.