This is an impressive theoretical question for sure.
1. All powder or tablet forms of Spirulina are not whole foods, they are isolated parts of the whole.
2. Most of the powders are not pure Spirulina, and tablets are not at all.
Tablets require the initial processing of into a dry powder followed by a secondarily processing using binding agents to hold the ingredients (cellulose, magnesium iterate, silica, sodium starch glycolate, silicon dioxide to name a few) together.
3. Powders and tablet Spirulina are cooked in large spray drying machines which destroy most of the nutrients. What is left behind is mineral-based ash.
So, given that being said, and because of this, it is quite difficult and unfair to mother nature to compare “apples to apples” in this sense.
Imagine Fresh Spirulina like a whole cucumber. If you bake it in the oven at 600 degrees for an hour then put the remains into a blender, imagine what amount you would have left as compared to the original cucumber.
As in most fruits and vegetables, the water content is quite a high percentage of the whole. Living nutrients are water or liquid-based. Each living Spirulina cell is like a tiny “water-balloon”.
The living nutrients are what we absorb into our bloodstream to feed our cells while our body allows the dry material to pass down the system and eliminated as waste.
When these cells are cooked in high temp processing 202 C for 3-5 min. to make powders the cell walls are exploded allowing the liquid nutrients to spill out into the heat which evaporates into the air leaving behind the dry substance. All the micr0-phytonutrients present in living Spirulina are fragile and destroyed with heating.
This dry powder is generally 1/8th the original weight of the whole cell.
The bioavailability of food is determined by many things, with water content given the highest value.
However as stated above, even at 8X the powder you still will not have anything even remotely close to the original whole cell.
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