By Carla Oates
Here at The Beauty Chef, we count ourselves lucky to work with some of the best and brightest minds in the industry. In fact, much like the ecosystem of microbes living in our gut, our team is diverse, interconnected and constantly multiplying...
So to help you get to know us a little better—and to shed some light on the recent reformulation of our best-selling beauty powder, GLOW Inner Beauty Essential—we sat down with our very own product development guru and qualified naturopath, Rhiona Robertson, to answer some of your most complex (and commonly asked!) questions.
Having worked for more than 15 years in the natural medicine industry, Queensland-based Rhiona has an encyclopedic knowledge of even the most obscure superfoods and is the person to ask if you don’t know your carotenoids from your curcuminoids. Below, she talks us through the nitty-gritty of the new and improved GLOW® Inner Beauty Essential—and why our multitasking powder is so much more than a probiotic capsule or a multivitamin tablet.
Generally speaking, what makes GLOW® different from a supermarket multivitamin?
“A multivitamin typically uses a range of synthetic vitamins and minerals in a tablet or capsule form with no food-based ingredients, whereas GLOW® contains a range of Certified Organic fermented wholefoods such as mung beans, chickpeas, lentils and buckwheat, with probiotics and postbiotics. GLOW® also contains sprouted quinoa—which contains activated B group vitamins—natural beta carotene sources and The Beauty Chef’s own probiotic strain, Lactobacillus rhamnosus GUT5Y™.”
Unlike synthetic vitamin supplements, many of the nutrients in GLOW® come from wholefood sources. What are some of the benefits of getting your vitamin and mineral intake from these foods?
“Sometimes they’re closer to the way nature intended or come with additional nutrients. In the case of GLOW®, you have the benefits associated with fermented foods, such as postbiotics. We’ve added sprouted quinoa, which has standardised levels of the B group vitamins in their biologically active form. This means it not only contains B vitamins, but their coenzymes as well. When B vitamins are found in this way, there’s research that shows they can stay in the body longer.
GLOW® also contains natural sources of beta carotene. Also known as provitamin A, is the primary plant-based source of dietary vitamin A and makes vegetables like carrots orange in colour. When provitamin A is consumed, it converts into vitamin A and is then used for a range of functions in the body, including helping to form skin structure and support skin function.
As a complete formula, GLOW® contains a greater spectrum of compounds than a synthetic vitamin supplement, which are often limited to B group vitamins, vitamins C, A and some minerals. GLOW® also contains probiotics, postbiotics and polyphenols which act as antioxidants in the body.”
When it comes to probiotics, many people assume that the most effective supplements are those that contain the highest amounts of probiotic bacteria. Is this true?
“No, this isn’t always the case. If you consider where the basic idea of fermentation originated, it wasn’t one isolated strain, but a broad-spectrum of different bacterial species fermenting food. It’s important to understand that, while there are probiotics, there are other compounds such as prebiotics and postbiotics, all of which have different roles in the gut microbiome.
Prebiotics are consumed by probiotics as a fuel source, and during this process, metabolites (postbiotics) are formed. More and more research is showing that postbiotic compounds may benefit gut health, immune health and skin health.
So, while it may be true that some people need one isolated probiotic strain with a high CFU count, there are benefits to taking a supplement that contains a broad-spectrum probiotic, as well as postbiotic compounds.”
What’s the difference between a teaspoon of GLOW® and a probiotic capsule?
“The wholefood ingredients in GLOW® are fermented using The Beauty Chef’s exclusive Flora Culture™ fermentation process which uses a culture of 12 different species of probiotics. Unlike a probiotic supplement that may contain a high count of one or more strains of probiotics, the wholefood ingredient blend in GLOW® is fermented using a broad-spectrum culture. A broad-spectrum of different bacterial species can be beneficial for overall microbial diversity and provides a greater variety of microbiome-loving compounds than a single-strain probiotic capsule.”
