If you know a little bit about nutrition and about your own metabolism, you will know a little bit about lipoic acid, and how important it is for your well-being – or, at least, you have probably heard about it already. If we go a little more into detail about lipoic acid, we will be able to find two different forms of it.
We can see that there is the Alpha lipoic acid, and there is the R-lipoic acid. They are not the same, and the difference between these two isn’t very hard to understand but first, we need to go a little bit into what lipoic acid is so that we can better understand the difference.
Lipoic Acid
Essentially, lipoic acid is pretty much like a vitamin. It is a substance that the human body naturally produces, and it helps the body neutralize a different number of hazards as well as produce cellular energy. The acid has a lot of advantages to our body.
It Is possible to get your body to absorb lipoic acid through commercial products but these commercial products give you lipoic acid in different ways: alpha lipoic acid and R-lipoic acid. The difference between them is close to the difference between night and day, let’s elaborate.
These products have two major components: R and S (Rectus and Sinister, respectively). Simply put, the R is what our body naturally produces and as such, it is exactly what we need in order to get all of the advantages that lipoic acid gives us. On the other hand, S isn’t what is naturally produced and even though it’s there, it doesn’t really do a lot of things. Some people even consider S to be useless.
Alpha Lipoic Acid
Alpha lipoic acid consists of a mixture between R and S. This is a 50/50 mixture and it is widely available throughout the market because it is cheaper (due to the costs of S). But R-lipoic acid is made only out of R. It is usually around 10 times more expensive, but at the same time this is the component that is produced naturally in plants and animals, and as such the benefits of lipoic acid are in this component.
The S component is not natural and as such, the body has a little bit of difficulty absorbing it. Moreover, it is pretty much useless when absorbed and all its doing is just fill up space. The reason most manufacturers include it is that there is a market for it, and because it is a lot cheaper to make Alpha lipoic acid than to make R-lipoic acid.
This means that if you have money to spend, you should always go for R-lipoic acid instead of going for Alpha lipoic acid.