Tips From The Professor: Who's Testing Your Supplements?

It's so tempting...

You've been getting your supplements from a company
that you know and trust - a company that does clinical
studies on their products and performs rigorous quality
controls.

You know their products are pure, safe and effective...

BUT...

You're shopping in your favorite drug store or discount
store and you see the same supplements for just a
couple of dollars!

You can't help thinking...

"Wow! Here's the same stuff I've been taking for a lot
less money"..."Why not save my money?"..."They must
have run some quality control tests on their
products"...

"After all, how bad can they be?"

The answer is - pretty bad!

The events of last week illustrate just how bad.

On March 2nd, 2010 the makers and sellers of fish oil
supplements were sued by the Mateel Environmental
Justice Foundation in California for not telling
consumers that their products contained toxic levels of
PCBs.

I find it amusing and somewhat scary that the FDA did
not initiate this action and force the manufacturers to
take their contaminated products off the shelves.

Instead an environmental consumers group had to sue
them for not including PCBs on the label! They sued
them under California proposition 65 which requires a
warning label whenever a product contains toxic
ingredients.

The defendants in this lawsuit were Omega Protein, a
Houston-based company that is the world's largest
producer of omega-3 fish oil, and the many companies
that they produced fish oil for - companies like Rite
Aid, CVS, GNC, Now Health Group, Pharmavite, Solgar and
Twinlab.

And those aren't the only ones. The Mateel
Environmental Justice Foundation only tested 10 omega-3
supplements manufactured by Omega Protein to date and
have found PCBs in all of them. They plan to continue
testing and to add other companies to the lawsuit if
their products are also contaminated.

Even scarier is that many of labels on these products
said that the omega-3 supplement was treated to reduce
or remove PCBs. As a consumer you were lead to believe
that they were safe!

The bottom line is that the manufacturer probably
didn't test for PCBs and neither did the companies
selling their omega-3 supplements to the consumer

The alternative - that they tested the products, knew
that they were contaminated with PCBs and sold them to
the public anyway - is even worse.

As if that weren't scary enough the FDA announced a
massive recall of products containing textured
vegetable protein manufactured by a company called
Basic Food Flavors because of salmonella contamination.

The problem is that there are at least 56 different
kinds of consumer products containing this company's
textured vegetable protein - including salad dressings,
dips, packaged snacks, potato chips and soup mixes (Who
knew that salad dressings contained textured vegetable
protein?).

That means that this recall will be huge. It will
affect many foods that most people buy and use every
day.

Once again, the problem is that neither the
manufacturer or the companies using the textured
vegetable protein had run the basic quality control
assays that would have detected salmonella
contamination.

So what can you do as a consumer? Here are my
recommendations:

1) Get your supplements from an established company
with a reputation for quality and integrity. I would
recommend choosing a company that has been around for a
number of years so that you know that their reputation
is based on their track record over the years rather
than just on hype.

2) Make sure that they run rigorous quality controls on
their products. I would choose a company that requires
pharmaceutical grade quality controls on their
products.

3) Make sure that they have published clinical studies
on their products that prove both safety and
effectiveness. Again I would recommend choosing a
company that has many published clinical studies on
their products rather than just one or two.

To Your Health!
Dr. Stephen G Chaney

P.S. Shaklee supplements are my personal recommendation
because Shaklee insists on rigorous quality control
tests on every one of their ingredients and on their
finished products. For example, they import ultra pure,
triple distilled fish oil from England and test it for
PCB contamination after they receive it. They also have
published over 70 clinical studies on their products in
peer-reviewed scientific journals. They are unique in
the industry.


Wasn't that an eye opener? It's the reason for the supplement decisions we've made in our family for the past 14 years.

If you are confused by all of the product
choices that Shaklee offers...

If you are unsure of which supplements you should use
to dramatically improve your health and vitality... Contact Me.

To Your Health,
Lisa