Success Stories - Making mineral supplements measure up

August 1, 2008 — Ottawa, Ontario

When consumers take mineral supplements, they expect them to be safe, nutritional, and to provide a consistent amount of the mineral element in each capsule. Until now, delivering that level of consistency and guarantee of potency has been problematic for the natural health products industry. Dr. Zoltan Mester and his chemical metrology research team at the NRC-Institute for National Measurement Standards (NRC-INMS) are helping to solve this problem with reliable and precise measurements at the cellular level.

Using advanced mass spectrometry, electron microscopy and nanotechnology, Dr. Mester and his team, in partnership with scientists at university laboratories in Canada and the United States, are creating a process for evaluating the distribution of minerals in individual yeast cells. Selenium-enriched yeast is one of the most commonly used mineral supplements in the world. Selenium is touted for its role in cancer prevention and the mitigation of oxidative stress: yeast is easily absorbed by the human body and it transforms selenium into a form that is also easily absorbed.

Measuring at the cellular level eliminates the need for massive sample sizes for testing. “The approach to testing for mineral content hasn’t changed much in 200 years,” says Dr. Mester. The element is usually extracted from a large quantity of product sample, in order to obtain enough of the element for an accurate measurement. “The problem lies in the fact that the measurement is then averaged over the massive quantity of the original product, providing no precise indication of how a given mineral is distributed at the cellular level,” he adds.

In addition to measuring the quantity of mineral in a single cell, Dr. Mester is looking at the way yeast cells incorporate supplemental metals and produce different chemical forms of the metal. Knowing how the metals are transformed within the yeast cell will enable the nutritional supplement industry to produce standardized quantities, qualities and forms of mineral supplements.

“The efficacy of a trace element can be drastically different depending on the chemical structure surrounding the trace element in the cell,” notes Dr. Mester. Understanding the process by which a specific chemical form of an element is generated within yeast cells is a human health and public safety issue. The focus of the research is to determine how to increase the production of the beneficial forms of the minerals.

Dr. Mester’s team is working with research teams at other NRC institutes to chemically “map” the processes through which trace metals are incorporated into a yeast cell. As well, researchers at Harvard Medical School, Hamilton’s McMaster University, the Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago and Stanford University are contributing expertise.

The use of nanoscale chemical mapping technologies is allowing Dr. Mester’s team to monitor biochemical processes at the subcellular level. The measurement methods they develop will have far-reaching benefits for the manufacture of nutritional supplements and for all industries that use nanometre-sized materials. The capacity to conduct chemical measurements on the nanoscale is becoming ever more important to consumers around the world.

Dr. Mester and his team have a record of achievement in producing industry-changing innovations. Their previous work with selenium-enriched yeast resulted in the availability of a certified reference material (CRM) known as Selenium Enriched Yeast or SELM-1, a measurement standard for the nutritional supplements industry. Thanks to this benchmark for product quality, Canadian companies are able to show that their products meet industry standards, which will provide new opportunities for international trade.