Supplement Quality – Are you getting what you think you are?

There can be crazy stuff inside junk supplements… Learn how to get good quality supplements and avoid the bad ones.

Here’s the Multi-Vitamin Comparison Chart discussed in the video. Click this link or the image below and the full PDF will open in a new window.

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How to Choose the Best Supplements – Transcript

Hi, this is Dr. Mitch Kennedy with healwithnature.com. And today we’re going to talk about why you should buy high-quality vitamins, any kind of vitamins, they should all be high quality because you shouldn’t spend your money on crap. Can I say that on YouTube? I don’t know. Anyway, here we go.
So think of it this way. If you’re someone who maybe doesn’t have the best nutrition, eats junk food, doesn’t get balanced meals all the time, or it’s really stressed, your body is craving, vitamins, and minerals that it doesn’t get.
And if you’re going to take something to supplement that, then you’re going to want something that’s going to give it to you in the most available format that your body can grab and use right away.
Format
You all probably have seen multivitamins that are like this big the horse pill kind of hard tablets that are coated with something smooth and waxy on the outside. Let’s talk about what the problem is with a one-a-day tablet format.
First of all, it’s large, and people who have trouble swallowing pills have trouble with those. Secondly, in order to make it smoother to swallow, they often put a coating on the outside. Now that can be plastic that can be wax, it can be all sorts of things. And you know, I have a handout for you, in the end, it compares all the different things, and you’ll be able to see what I’m talking about, there are so many different additives in these tablets that you don’t even want to know about it. But that’s just the beginning of this tablet’s travel.
The other thing is inside the tablet, everything has got to be compressed together. Then it’s got to be held together once it’s compressed, so it doesn’t fall apart. So not only are you getting stuff that’s jam-packed in there really, really tightly, you also have something that’s almost like glue, trying to hold the tablet together so that doesn’t break apart in the bottle when it hits all the other tablets.
One of the things they use is carnauba wax, you may have heard of it because you can put it on your car, to make it shiny. Yeah, that’s in there.
So today we want to talk about a better alternative. The thing that’s better is vitamins in capsules. Because capsules are usually made out of either vegetable or animal gelatin they dissolve in water very quickly and quickly release the powder inside.
You might have to take a couple more capsules than you would have to take of a tablet because the powders lose. It’s not packed in, it’s not glued together. But you’re going to be able to take this and have it open up and get into your body a lot more easily.
That’s the first thing. It’s called potency and absorbability.
The second aspect of this is, what format is the supplement that’s supposed to be in the vitamin, in terms of its ability to be absorbed by your body once it gets into your body? For example, there are iron frying pans, and you can try to get the iron for building your blood out of a frying pan. And you’ll get some – it’s about five to 10% absorbed. But it’s not that good. Red meat is better. If you don’t mind eating red meat that’s like 20% 25% absorbed. And then you can get into vitamins that are in powdered form that come in different iron formats like citrate. So they’ve taken the iron, they’ve attached it to something that’s sort of like vitamin C. And so it’s much more easily taken in by the cells of the intestines.
And that’s not just for minerals. That’s not just for calcium, magnesium, and zinc and all those it’s also for the vitamins themselves, vitamin D, vitamin A, K, all those things, the chemical format is really, really important.
And you’re not going to find that in a hard tablet. So that’s the first thing.
Quality
The second thing is quality. And when I talk about quality, I mean, not just the format’s that I already mentioned, but the lack of things. So for example, did they test their materials before they made the vitamin for things like mold because truth be told some of this stuff is made in different countries, and then it comes over by big boat, a slow boat from somewhere. And that’s moist down there, things could get moldy, whatever. There might have been mold on the material after it’s sat in the warehouse.
There can be residues like pesticides, there can even be heavy metals sometimes like lead. A number of years ago, there was a big news story in the US about Finding lead in calcium supplements. And that was a quality control issue. So the quality is really important.
To know that you’re getting quality, you have to have a couple of things. The first is the company should follow what’s called “good manufacturing practices” or GMP. This is a certification that the company gets, by developing all these instructions, so that everybody in the factory does the same steps the same way the whole time they make the supplement.
It has to do with cleanliness also. So that’s really important. And so if your vitamin doesn’t have a GMP logo at the bottom of the corner of the bottles, that’s concerning.
The other thing is it should be tested. So the substances that are in the vitamin should be tested for mold, for heavy metals, for pesticides for being rancid. So for example, vitamin E, vitamin A, K, and D are all oil-based vitamins.
As you might know, oil can go rancid if it sits around too long or gets too hot, whatever. Good companies test for that. That’s really important.
Here’s another example of a quality issue. There are many plants that look similar, right? One of them can be the kind of plant that would help you with the beneficial properties you’re looking for. And the other one, which looks just like the good plant but could be a toxic look-alike plant. Someone who’s collecting those herbs may not know the difference and might sell them really cheaply, because they want to make the money.
They can’t provide any insurance because they don’t know how to. So the companies that buy the cheapest herbs usually get not only the oldest herbs, but they also get the herbs and other substances that may or may not be what they say they are.
I have friends in the nutritional supplement industry. They told me stories that when stuff comes in, they test it, but the test comes back stating that it is not what they ordered, so they send it back.
This is why quality matters in a lot of different ways. Because you don’t want to be taking something that you think is one thing when it’s actually something completely different. The second thing that you need to be concerned about with low-quality supplements is where the raw material comes from, speaking briefly, again about like botanical medicines, herbs, they could be growing at the side of a road in a ditch, that could be a sewage ditch, that could be a ditch where all the oils and everything from the road runoff and the plant absorbs that so that plants contaminated with gasoline and lead and all sorts of product byproducts that are toxic to you.
Now, if the company that buys that doesn’t test for those things, they’ll never know they’re in there, they’re in there, but they won’t know it. So you won’t know it either. That’s the quality aspect of it.
Additives
Let’s move on to the third thing, which kind of ties in is additives some companies will put in well, I have a list here. So I’m just gonna glance at the list. Something like polyethylene glycol, which is closely related to radiator fluid, crospovidone, which is another thing that shows up in foodstuffs, and also cosmetics BHT, which is a preservative.
Things like gelatin, and hydrogenated palm oils, are all additives that are added in to poor quality products to either make. Like I said earlier that tablets stick together or to make them have better color, or to make them not have a bad smell, for example.
You don’t need any of those because there’s no nutritional value in any of that stuff. It’s just getting in the way of you absorbing what you really do need, which is basically the vitamins and minerals.
So again, we go back to that capsule, you got a capsule with a loose powder inside it. That’s one of your best bets.
Age
Now, aside from that, you should still be asking one more question. How old are my vitamins?
And this is got two angles to it. The first is the time that the raw materials sit in either warehouse or the factory before they get used, right because warehouses usually are air-conditioned. So in the summer, or if let’s say they were in a very hot climate somewhere. Yeah, those things could get really hot, they could start to break down.
The other thing is, once it’s made and it gets shipped somewhere, is it sitting on the shelf and say, in a supermarket or pharmacy or anywhere really…, how long is it sitting there before someone buys it?
So if it’s not a store that moves a lot of product, in the sense that, you know, the shelf gets turned over quickly you really gotta wonder. So make sure to check the expiration date. And that’s really helpful because you can look at that date, and you say, Oh, well, that’s gonna expire in a month. So maybe you don’t want that one, you could try to reach into the back of the shelf, and one that maybe is a little newer.
That should be a red flag right there saying, oh, boy, this is gonna expire in a month, they don’t move a lot of product. So you could probably be guaranteed that all the vitamins in that store don’t sell very much.
Sometimes discounted online stores will sell things cheaply because they’re really coming close to the end of their expiration date, so they give you a really good price. But when you get it, you see that it’s only got a month left or something like that. Now, that said, there are very reputable sites that do high-quality work and are moving a lot of products, so you don’t have to worry about them.
Where do you get good quality vitamins?
There are four places:
The first would be to go develop a relationship with a naturopathic physician or some other alternative medicine-minded physician who carries them as part of their medicinary.
The second would be to go to your local independently-owned health food store, as they do a lot of their own research and know a lot about what they carry.
The third option would be to go to a national chain health food store. They will have several aisles of nutritional supplements.
Lastly, you’re welcome to come to our website, healwithnature.com/deals, where we are offering hand-selected, physician-quality vitamins at a 15% discount.
As I said, we have a handout for you on this. And it’s going to be available for download on https://healwithnature.com/get-access/
Thank you very much.