I use to take a zinc table 50mg that is the same size as my current multivitamins which has like a thousand vitamins/minerals compacted in it with relatively same amount of zinc.
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Most vitamin gummies contain micrograms of the actual active ingredient (vitamin), most of the tablet is covering material that can be filled with much more times of amounts of active ingredients
Why can I fill a glass with two different beverages at the same time?
You just use less than a glass of each.
If you put your zinc tablet on a scale and weigh it you’ll see that it’s way more than 50 mg. Most of it is some filler. And that’s the same with multi-mineral tablets.
Because 99% or thereabouts of any pill is filler material. Think about it 50 mg is an amount that would be like 1/100th of a teaspoon. Or something like 100 grains of table salt. If they made a pill the size of 100 grains of salt, it could not be easily handled without precision tools – which would be useless as pills to take home. Just breathing on it would probably cause it to scatter like dust.
Basically enough filler is added so that the pill becomes large enough to be easily bonded into a pill, counted, handled and dispensed for normal people with average dexterity without using tools.
It isn’t difficult to mix together several vitamins (since vitamin daily doses are generally very small – some are measured in micrograms) and that mixture would likely still require fillers to make up a reasonably sized pill.
Do you know how small the actual vitamin quantities are? 50 mg is *50/1000 of a gram*. That’s like a grain of sand. The pills would be too small to work with, count, or take. Your breath could blow a 50mg pill out of your hand and then it would be hard to find and even harder to pick up again.
**Pills are like 95% inert filler** material just to make them easier to manufacture consistently, handle, etc.
A multivitamin with a bunch of vitamins and minerals **just uses slightly less filler.**
Because the vast majority of pills, vitamins, etc. are non-active ingredients to give them enough size to handle, make them shelf stable, to slowly dispense the active ingredient as pill gets digested, etc.
I happen to have 2 popular name brand vitamin bottles beside me as I read this. One is a multi vitamin and one is vitamin B12 only. The multivitamin has 18 mcg of vitamin B12, the Pure Vitamin is a B12 pill that has 1000mcg.
Capsules are mostly filler, but that filler is helpful because adding a little bit of vitamin into a lot of filler, and mixing it really well, makes it easier to portion out the vitamin so it’s consistent across capsules, in a size/shape that’s easy to swallow.
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