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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