What is CoQ10?

Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary defines coenzyme Q as ubiquinone (suggesting its widespread occurrence in nature) and describes it as "a quinone that functions as an electron transfer agent between cytochromes in the Krebs cycle."

Today, in a version known as coenzyme Q-10 (CoQ-10) or ubiquinol, this nutrient has become a popular seller and a product that is synonymous with increasing users’ cellular energy. Further, many studies have shown, it has value in combating various forms of cardiovascular disease, reducing the number and size of some tumors and treating gum disease. In fact, according to the newsletter Nutrition News, it has extended the life span of laboratory animals up to 56%. Yet, for almost 30 years, this powerful nutrient languished in the shadows, little understood and used by a scant few of the nutritional cognoscenti. Today, CoQ10 has been clinically shown to improve heart function!

In the book All About Coenzyme Q-10, an entry in Avery Publishing Group’s series on Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ's), author Ray Sahelian, M.D., reports that CoQ-10’s discovery dates all the way to 1957. It was then that Frederick Crane, Ph.D., working at the University of Wisconsin, isolated an orange substance from the mitochondria of beef heart. The following year, says Sahelian, Karl Folkers, Ph.D., and coworkers at Merck synthesized the orange molecule in the laboratory. As one of the pioneering researchers, Folkers played a role in naming the substance CoQ-10. When he was in his 80s (he now is deceased), he mused about whether it would have sold better earlier had it been called a vitamin.

Technically speaking, however, CoQ-10 is not a vitamin. According to Sahelian, vitamins are nutrients that cannot be manufactured by the body, but must be ingested. CoQ-10 is manufactured by the body, but rarely in sufficient amounts to confer significant health benefits. Therefore, CoQ-10 is "vitamin-like" in that supplementation is needed.

In the mid 1970's, the Japanese perfected the industrial technology of fermentation to produce pure CoQ10 in significant quantities. To this day, virtually all CoQ10 still comes from Japan. There are two different methods of manufacture. One is via fermentation and the other is via a combination of fermentation and synthesis.

In the early 1970s, there were discoveries that people with gum disease and heart disease were deficient in CoQ-10. The momentum began to build and, by the early 1980's, CoQ-10 had reached a level of consumption in Japan that rivaled that country’s five top medications. In fact, all along, it has been the Japanese and the Europeans who have conducted the majority of clinical trials using CoQ-10.

Q-Gel® is a hydrosoluble CoQ10 supplement and the ONLY CoQ10 supplement that passes the dissolution test.

All of our Q-Gel® CoQ10 is produced via the fermentation process using 100% food source ingredients. All CoQ10 is obtained either by 100% fermentation which yields NATURAL -- 100% ALL TRANS CoQ10 (the type we use in Q-Gel) -- or the cheaper synthetic alternative which involves partial fermentation and then synthesis using “solanesol” a chemical extracted from the tobacco leaf, (we do NOT use this type!). Please rest assured that there is no residual yeast in our Q-Gel products.