It all started when I was fresh out of my medical training - I started to read all I could about vitamins and supplements. In the medical school and residency that is not well regarded. I read medical study after medical study that showed benefits from high doses of vitamins and other nutrients.

In the meantime the adversaries claimed there was no evidence that vitamins work. First, this is why they are called vitamins or essential nutrients, because they are vital, meaning that we literally die without enough of them. Second, the studies were just there under their eyes, they just refused to look at them.

While looking at the medical studies I discovered an interesting pattern: the studies showing greater benefits used higher doses of vitamins or nutrients. In other words the effect on health was directly dose related.  Asking myself why did they go higher with the doses in the medical studies the answer came quickly. Using higher doses increased their chances of them working well and therefore their chances of reporting and publishing positive effects. If doses were low, the positive effect was missing and studies of no significance do not get published. This was a big WOW! I am convinced that the studies I read were published exactly because they had good, positive findings to report and they had these positive findings exactly because they used high doses of vitamins or nutrients. WOW again!

Based on this logic, because I wanted to offer my patients vitamins and nutrients that made them feel better, the obvious choice for me was to give them higher vitamin and nutrient doses, similar to those shown in medical studies to have great health benefits.

So I started to look for a very high potency multivitamin, but also with high doses of minerals, amino-acids, plant extracts, in other words a complete product that would really make a difference.

For several years I was hoping to find the “Perfect Vitamin and Mineral Health Supplement.”  But the more I looked, the more frustrated I became, as I realized that the perfect multi-supplement were nowhere to be found.  Instead, what I found were lots and lots of one-a-day multivitamins and very low potency products filled with colorants, aluminum, fillers and even toxins.

After some time I started to ask myself: why don’t I see super potent high dose supplements in commercial stores? The answer was interesting, intriguing and challenging in the same time.

One main reason the strong perfect multi vitamins was nowhere to be found  – besides the obvious corporate money and profit issue that goes in hand with cheap, low potency ingredients – was that most multivitamins wanted to market a multi-vitamin that is “Complete” – in their mind – meaning they contain all vitamins and minerals from “A to Z”. I immediately saw the problem in the A to Z concept: the ingredients can not be properly balanced! Why?

It became obvious to me that if one wants to provide all A to Z ingredients in a bottle they have to include several very bulky ingredients that will literally steal space from other ingredients and will not let them have enough physical space to maximize or increase the amounts of the other elements (that are not bulky), unless we want to end up with something like …..22 pills a day. Which was, obviously, a difficult selling point!

So, after some time, I came out with a different approach: I took the bulky ingredients out of the formula, and maximized the concentration of all other ingredients. I increased doses on average 7-10 times the RDA, and many times 100 times and occasionally 1,000 times the RDA where it was safe. I called this high dose-but-still-safe dosing the  “The Power Zone”.Those doses were still 4-7 times or more higher on average than the so called “optimal” doses. In the end, I reintroduced some good amount of the bulky ingredients, but not high enough to choke the other.