Consumer Checklist for High Quality Vitamin Supplements

 You have to be very careful with supplements these days.  Here are a couple tips.  For me I use one which is quality tested by third party and has been published in numerous peer reviewed medical and nutrition journals worldwide.  Not to mention it is all natural and made from raw materials.

*Do you have a way to tell if the supplement (vitamin) that you’re using is being absorbed & assimilated? 

The place to begin is to see if your supplement dissolves when placed in water within 30 minutes
or less.  That is the same standard the pharmaceutical industry uses for tablets. Otherwise it goes in one end and out the other. That is just the very beginning. 

The second and most critical question is...  

• Are the supplements you are taking being absorbed and assimilated into the
bloodstream where they are available to the cells?   Always ask the company for peer reviewed research on their products.  The key word here is peer reviewed.  That means it is unbiased, legitimate research vs. advertising research where you pay someone to publish your research in what looks like a legitimate journal. 

• Is there balance in the formulation?
Balance is critical to a well-formulated supplement.  Many nutrients do not work effectively unless
in a certain balance.  . 
For example  The B vitamin Biotin is extremely expensive.  It should offer at least 100 % of the daily
value.  Most vitamins will show none at all or less than 100% That is a sign to you of a poorly formulated vitamin, so read your labels. 

• Is the amount on the label the amount in each tablet? 
A common problem in the food supplement industry is quality control.  It is not uncommon for the
amount in each individual tablet in a bottle of supplements to vary dramatically.  .

• Is the manufacturer using a “cooling” system to preserve nutrients?

When supplements are manufactured at a low temperature, all the vitamins, minerals, enzymes, phytonutrients are not lost in the process. Without the enzymes, the body cannot utilize or absorb
the nutrients effectively.  It is common for companies to use too much heat and pressure in making their tablets, which destroys the enzymes.  

• Are sugars, artificial colorings or sweeteners used?
 It is common for vitamins to have artificial coloring and sweeteners in them.  Read the labels to
determine their presence.

• Are the supplements you are using safe and do you trust the company to have your
best interest in mind over profit?  
While no vitamins are FDA approved, a few have received awards/ recognition from the FDA.  Also check the reviews on the vitamin for side effects and guarantee before purchasing.

• Is there a full money back guarantee?

Whole Food vs. Raw Material Vitamins

This is often a difficult issue because of the conventional perception that whole food supplements can be made from fresh fruits and vegetables and somehow dried and compressed into a tablet. Unfortunately, this is not possible or realistic. A supplement condensed or compressed from a whole food would actually contain little nutrient value, and would require taking an inordinately large number of servings or tablets to get even one serving with adequate nutritional value. Take spinach, for example. If we consider a reasonable serving size for spinach to be one cup of cooked spinach, the spinach in that serving would weigh about 180 grams. Dried and made into a powder, it would weigh about 30 grams. Since a normal-sized tablet holds about a half gram of powder, at best, to get the equivalent of a cup of cooked spinach, you would need to consume a minimum of 60 tablets. And that’s for the nutrients in spinach, alone.

Raw Material Vitamins (whole food concentrates) on the other hand are free from pesticides, chemicals, genetically altered compounds, the good ones are made from 100% organic (better than USDA organic- which by law is only 98%), made from pure (natural as possible) materials which are quality tested through a third party and have ingredients that reflect the most recent scientific and technological advances.  Finding a really good raw material vitamin would need to have clinical testing done (when necessary) and have those studies published in a peer-reviewed scientific and medical journals, such as The New England Journal of Medicine, The Journal of the American Medical Association, The American Journal of Cardiology and others.  I personally have only found one vitamin company that meets these standards.