Who Makes Your Supplements?

“NOW Foods, which makes and sells supplements itself, bought 25 vitamin C gummy brands off Amazon and paid an accredited lab to test them. They published the results last week. Twelve had almost no detectable vitamin C. Five claimed 1,000mg or more per gummy and contained under 2mg.”

Yikes. And Vitamin C has to be one of the cheapest active ingredients going, so imagine the incentive to skip “real” ingredients. o_O

American. Some of us turn to nutrition and supplementation because ourselves families are ill, and we cannot afford to take the financial burden -- a financial burden made heavier so more can be looted from us.

Even these scraps are poisoned by people trying to scrape more profit at the cost of others.

I have no words to describe how soul wrenching everything is.

Don't buy blends or gummies - they pose a higher risk.

Also, don't buy from most random low-volume brands, although there are some good exceptions, e.g. ProHealth.

Real vitamin C capsules containing ascorbic acid turn from white to brown with age over a few months of a bottle being open. For this reason, never buy a very large bottle of it. Also, the taste of vitamin C is very characteristic. If it has turned brown, it should be discarded due to oxidative damage.

There are many layers to consumer supplement confusion - seeing marks like NSF Certified for Sport, USP Verified or even eGMP on a bottle are a good start, but there's also the risk of buying counterfeit products on Amazon/eBay, storage (hot warehouses, shipping during summer months, etc.)

And don't get me started on "proprietary blends"!

Planet Money has a good episode on this:

https://one.npr.org/i/nx-s1-5847893:nx-s1-mx-5847893-1