I tweaked the recipes for my Thin & Satisfied Weight Loss Bar and my eXtreme Nutrition Bar to provide at least 20% of the minimum RDI of 10 minerals and 14 vitamins.
Because I had to use so much red capsicum powder to get the required level of vitamin B6 the first batch of both bars has a spicy after taste.
Researching buying some B6 powder I was looking at the different forms of B6 available on Wikipedia and came across this little gem which explains the process by which our access to natural substances is removed from us to allow big pharma to profit:
(Pyridoxamine is one of the 3 forms of B6.)
FDA Regulatory Activity
Pyridoxamine was marketed as a dietary supplement, often as the hydrochloride salt, pyridoxamine dihydrochloride. However, in the United States, the FDA ruled in January 2009 that pyridoxamine must be regulated as a pharmaceutical drug because it is the active ingredient in Pyridorin, a drug designed by Biostratum, Inc., to prevent the progression of diabetic nephropathy.[12][13][14][15]
Pyridorin had success in early clinical trials, found to be effective in slowing the progression of diabetic neuropathy in a phase II trial on 224 patients.[13] However, in 2005 Biostratum ran out of money and so was unable to begin a Phase III trial.[13] Investors in Biostratum had realized that because Biostratum had no patent on pyridoxamine itself, and that pyridoxamine was commonly available for purchase as a dietary supplement, the company would be unable to charge enough money for the treatment (should it be approved as a prescription drug by the FDA) for the investors to get a reasonable return on the investment they had already made (about $100M) much less on the additional investment a Phase III trial would require.[13] To solve this problem, Biostratum submitted a Citizen Petition to the FDA on July 29, 2005, seeking to disallow sales of pyridoxamine-containing supplements on the grounds that pyridoxamine, as the subject of an Investigational New Drug Application with the FDA, is a drug and not a dietary supplement.[13] This petition was opposed by the Council for Responsible Nutrition, a trade association of the dietary supplement industry.[13] On January 12, 2009, the FDA ruled that products containing pyridoxamine are excluded from the definition of dietary supplements as defined by the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994.[14] The FDA stated that the status of Pyridorin as an investigational new drug, as a result of an application filed by BioStratum in July 1999 and effective on September 1, 1999, meant that “the marketing of pyridoxamine in a dietary supplement is essentially equivalent to the marketing of an investigational new drug as a dietary supplement” because there was an “absence of independent, verifiable evidence that the substance was marketed as a food or a dietary supplement prior to its authorization for investigation as a new drug.”[16]
In 2006, Biostratum licensed its rights in Pyridorin to another company, NephroGenex [17] In 2008, NephroGenex restarted the clinical development of Pyridorin, which as of 2012 is still ongoing.[18]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyridoxamine
Toms Blog on Life and Livingness