How Chelated Minerals are Formed

Interviewer: Max, can you just describe what a chelate is? 

Max: Sure. Well number one, mineral amino acid chelate is a specialty form of mineral that's really a mineral delivery system. And I got this little prop here. Now, to form the typical Albion chelate, you have two amino acids. We use glycine. If you picture this as a glycine and this as a glycine, to form a chelate they have to come and wrap around the mineral, whether it's iron or magnesium or calcium, in this fashion. And there is special bonding between the glycine. It's bonded at the amino end and at the acid end. And they form very specific forms of bonds. The important one is called a covalent bond, a coordinate covalent bond. And rather than go into the detail of what that means, what it does is it gives the chelate a better stability constant. It keeps it from falling apart as easily as like therasulfate, a non-chelate form would. And actually the stability constant and keeping this togetherness weight results in giving the chelate its advantages over the non-chelate forms. Basically, a chelate would look like this and stay like this because of the stability constant. And also it's important the size of the molecule. The smaller you can make it, the better absorption results typically will be. And that's why glycine is so good, because it is the smallest amino acid.

Interviewer: So what sorts of supplements are most often found in a chelated form?

Max: Well, you will find chelates in tablets, in capsules, in ready-to- drink products. It's also found in foods and beverages. It's got very good with what we refer organoleptic properties, so you can mix it into food and it doesn't affect the texture of the food. It has minimal effect on flavor, things like that. So it's very adaptable to food and beverages as well as tablets, capsules, soft gels, goos, because today they're becoming more and more inventive in terms of how to deliver dietary supplements. In particular, the millennials are groups that like buying things that are not tablets and capsules, and they like to go for these new forms. So, it's caused Albion to look at a lot of things about the product in addition to the chelate itself. We have to look into what particle size range we form, because the granulometry, as its referred to, needs to be closer together at a smaller size for instance when they fortify yogurt, or things like that. So the chelate is great, and then we have to take into account granulomerty because of these new forms for millennials and things such as that.