Health talk

I am going to share a couple things related to health and wellness that I subscribe to. There is this great website Hovid.sg that is run by Hovid, a Malaysian-based company that manufactures and sells pharmanceuticals and nutraceuticals. They have an online store that delivers the next day to customers in Singapore at a flat rate of $10 (so buy more at one go). I discovered the website by accident, on a doctor's blog who said that he buys his clinic's medicine from them. I checked it out and realised that its Carotech subsidiary holds a patent for the extraction process of carotenes and tocotrienols from palm oil. Now I have been reading alot about tocotrienols, which is a type of Vitamin E that is a few hundred times more easily adsorbed by the human body, as compared to the more common form of Vitamin E available as supplement, called tocopherols. Tocotrienols are not easily available as supplements due to the high cost, mainly from the extraction process, so the Vitamin E supplements retailing are tocopherols (in Singapore, I have yet to find tocotrienols being sold in pharmacies). Tocotrienols are strong anti-oxidants, which bring a whole slew of benefits to the human body, including anti-aging, cholestrol reduction, cancer & tumour prevention, and lower blood pressure. Tocotrienols are also found to be more potent in their anti-oxidation and anti-cancer effects than tocopherols. Dr Nicholas Perricone, a well-known US dermatologist and scholar, has written extensively about the benefits of tocotrienols. Hovid sells tocotrienols at a cheaper price than those I have checked out online, because the middleman is cut out, but tocotrienols are 2-3 times more expensive than tocopherols, the common Vitamin E supplements we see on the shelves. Hovid also sells a good multivitamin formulation known as Betaton, which contains a far wider range of essential vitamins than most products I see at Guardian or Watson's, although the vits included may differ in terms of constituent amounts. Then it really depends on what you think you would need more. For example, Betaton contains many more members of the Vit B family like B5 and B8. It also contains the rare Vit H and trace amounts of Copper, Manganese and Molybdenum, in addition to all the common vitamins we know.