Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

First, all that good-sounding stuff that's in there - apple, spinach, tomato, carrot, broccoli, rice hull, etc. - has absolutely NOTHING to do with your dosage of zinc. It's just filler to bring the capsule up to size - and to make you think - if you don't read closely - that you are getting your zinc 'naturally' through raw veggies or whatever. You aren't. The company doesn't even CLAIM that. It says at the company's website that your supplement is "delivered in a whole food base of 23 fruits and vegetables." Like powdered apple and powdered tomato. That have absolutely nothing to do with your dose of zinc. Carefully reading all the information this company provides regarding its products reveals plenty of complex and confusing babble - to make you think their products are superior … without actually saying anything meaningful about what ACTUALLY makes their products superior. Because they aren't. An example of such babble: "Nobel Prize-winning science that inspired this process to grow food vitamins similar to vegetables in the soil." Guess what that means? It means that your vitamin was grown by fermentation in a yeast culture, a process that science discovered eons ago. (And that's sort of the way vitamins accumulate inside growing food plants.) And the website elsewhere admits the supplement is artificially cultivated, not derived from veggies or whatever, saying the product is "made with individually grown nutrients utilizing probiotic cultivation to produce RAW Food-Created Nutrients." And guess what else? That cultivation/fermentation process is the VERY SAME process EVERY vitamin manufacturer follows to obtain its vitamins. Not exactly so superior, eh? Now what does all this talk about 'RAW food nutrients' really mean? Nothing, absolutely nothing. Just more marketing, to mislead you into thinking that, somehow, this product is delivering your zinc in some better, natural way. It is not. "RAW Food-Created Nutrients" is nothing more than a phrase trademarked by the company. Basically it's a marketing slogan. Wheaties cereal has a famous trademark: "Breakfast of Champions." Sounds good, but what does it MEAN? Nothing. They can slap it on every box of cereal they sell, even if not one single 'champion' ever eats a single bowl of it. But Wheaties can TRY to convince you that it means … well, whatever they want you to think it means. But it actually means nothing. Sounds good, means nothing. This company's "Raw Food" jabber also means absolutely nothing. Except, maybe, that the product hasn't been cooked. (And who WOULD cook it to put in a capsule anyway?) But the phrase is MEANT to mislead you into thinking that you are getting your supplement by some zen-like, far-superior means. You aren't. Consider this statement about 'raw food' by the company: "The magic of raw food is truly found in its simplicity. When you eat a food that is uncooked … you are eating that food in harmony with nature’s intention and your body’s design." Yeah, maybe, maybe not. I'm not up for eating raw chicken and contracting salmonella. Even if it were taken as a completely true statement, it doesn't really say anything meaningful ... or relevant to the superiority of this product. But either way, what does stuffing some "raw food" powdered apples and tomatoes in my zinc capsule have to do with whether or not it's a superior zinc supplement? Nothing, absolutely nothing. The information that ACTUALLY MATTERS as to whether this is a superior product … well that information is absolutely and glaringly … absent. For instance, WHAT KIND OF ZINC DOES THIS PRODUCT CONTAIN? It matters ... a whole lot. Science well knows that plain old zinc is poorly absorbed/metabolized. So as a supplement it is typically compounded (or 'chelated') with another substance that will improve its absorption. Some zinc compounds are more effective at being absorbed than others. Zinc Acetate is better absorbed than Zinc Gluconate, but neither is better at absorption than Zinc Orotate which is very well absorbed. Zinc Oxide absorbs more poorly than any of them. So now, of course, you want to know what kind of zinc is in THIS product, right? Search the bottle, search the box, search the website all you want – and it doesn't tell you. All it says is that you are getting 30mg of zinc. Period. It might even be the cheapest and most ineffective form of zinc, JUST zinc, for all we know. But one thing's for sure. THIS COMPANY IS NOT GOING TO TELL YOU. In fact, you can look in the Q&A above and see that someone actually WROTE the company to ask what kind of zinc it was ... and the company responded with more babble ... and actually REFUSED to directly answer his question about what kind of zinc it is. That's a pretty good indication it's the WORST kind of zinc ... plain zinc or zinc oxide that doesn't metabolize well at all ... or they'd be proud to say otherwise. Also, large dosing of zinc can lead to a copper deficiency. Does THIS product contain trace copper to counter-act that? Who knows? Because the product information this company provides certainly doesn't tell you. EYE CAN TELL YOU that other, better zinc supplements DO add trace copper. So, IMHO, the glowing 5-star reviews here are little more than marketing babble working its magic well. I bought this product on impulse. Once I had a chance at home to do the research on the product, I threw it in the trash. And then I ordered a bottle of NOW (brand) L-OptiZinc Capsules, which appears to be a far superior zinc supplement. Far superior than a capsule filled with some vegetable powder and some zinc that can't even be metabolized!