Purity & Quality

Why Capsules?

Encapsulation of dietary supplements offers significant advantages over tableting, such as the ability to provide greater purity and bioavailability of nutrients.

Making tablets requires that other ingredients be added, in addition to just the nutrients. Binders, lubricants, coatings, disintegrants, and other excipients are the ingredients most commonly added by tablet manufacturers. These ingredients must be added to make the tablet stay together, to make the tablet shiny, and to make the tablet break apart.

Tablet press machines compact the powdered nutrients together (that have already been mixed with binders and lubricants) with a tremendous amount of force. Then, to make them shiny and easier to swallow, the tablets are often sprayed with coatings such as shellac – like the shellac found on furniture but instead labeled "pharmaceutical glaze" – or coated with "vegetable protein," most often a protein derived from corn.

Thorne is the pioneering force behind pure encapsulation, discovering early on just how perfectly a capsule provides for the rapid dissolution and unimpeded absorption of our formulas in the body – resulting in the most efficient nutrient delivery possible.