Supplement Quality

Supplement Quality

Hi, I’m Dr. Emily Parke with your Functional Health Minute for today. I would to talk about supplement quality and how to make sure you’re getting a good quality nutritional supplement if you are taking nutritional supplements. The very first thing you’re going to want to do is of course check your label. You want to make sure that the company at least has a GMP stamp on it, meaning, GMP stands for good manufacturing practices. What that means is that the supplement was at the very least manufactured in a good clean facility, which is, of course, important.

Third Party Quality Testing

The next level of looking at the label is you want to look to see if there is any third party quality testing been done. Now, for some companies they do put this directly on the label, for other companies they do not put it on the label, but if you went to their website it becomes very obvious that they are doing third party quality testing.

Third party quality testing means a company from the outside of that company came in and analyzed what was in the supplement, and proved that what’s on the label actually matches what is in the product. That’s really crucial because there were a couple of studies done in the last decade that were pretty damaging to the supplement industry, because it is not regulated by the FDA, which is what makes third party quality test all the more important.

Quality Sources

One study in particular looked at vitamin D levels, and this was published in JAMA, The Journal of the American Medical Association. They went around and took vitamin D’s from drugstores, grocery stores, places like that. Analyzed what was in them, and found a wide variety, anywhere from about 9% up to I think it was 126% of what it said was on the label, was actually in there.

And then another separate study done looking at supplements, all kinds not just vitamin D, found that almost 70% of all supplements had some kind of major discrepancy from the label as to what was actually in the product, meaning that a lot of the supplements either didn’t have any of the ingredient it said was on the label was in there, or extra ingredients, and in some cases there were traces of medications found in nutritional supplements.

This makes it really crucial to make sure you’re getting your supplements from a good quality source that has been third party quality tested, otherwise there is nobody regulating the quality of what’s in your supplement. This is Dr. Emily Parke with your Health Minute.