We believe that Healthspan now offers more vegetarian supplements than anyone else. Here’s why.

It is estimated that 9% of the UK population are vegetarians - that’s over 5 million people. By definition vegetarians already recognise the relationship of nutrition to good health. It is therefore, in our opinion, a responsibility of nutritional healthfood suppliers to provide products that can be taken by vegetarians, so as not to exclude them from the benefits of supplementation. This same logic also applies to those people of religious persuasions that would otherwise be excluded from taking supplements because they contain ingredients of unacceptable animal origin.

But this is only half the reason that Healthspan has made the majority of our products suitable for vegetarians. Historically there have been incidences of transgenic (crossing the species barrier) disease transmission. BSE is perhaps one of the worst and most recent examples. The government has taken steps to ensure that our meat products are safe, but the prions in BSE have been a formidable opponent. We therefore believe that as health food suppliers, we should always err on the side of safety. For this reason, we have moved all of our ‘soft shell capsules’, that contain oils, such as cod liver oil, evening primrose oil etc over to completely ‘gelatin free’ capsules (except for those that are unstable without gelatin). For those unfamiliar with gelatin, most of it is produced from bovine sources, principally the trachea of cattle. So, although we have no evidence that gelatin is unsafe, we prefer to be cautious.

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