Supplement Quality Uncertainty-I bet you didn’t know this!
by Mila McManus, MD
We expect our food to be what it says on the ingredient label. We assume the gasoline we put in our cars is not watered down. We figure the bottled water we buy is pure, clean, harmless water. And we are confident everything sold on Amazon is genuine, authentic, and good quality. Should we always be this confident? For all four of these assumptions, I can recall at least one news story or personal experience where this was not the case!
Supplement ingredients and purity are no different! Wise decision making is needed to avoid some sad falsehoods. Supplements are an exploding industry, and not everyone is testing for quality, dosage accuracy, and purity. One study in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine[i] showed that more than 71% of melatonin supplements contained more or less than the package dose indicated, some by considerable amounts. This study is just one example of many. Supplements, like melatonin, are not fully regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and there are no federal requirements that companies test their supplements to ensure they contain the amount advertised. Examples like this continue to surface routinely and are the reason, in 2017, I wrote an article about supplement ingredients and quality, and feel the need to present it again. Things have not changed, and perhaps they have gotten worse. Did you know that 1 out of every 2 supplements sold on Amazon is counterfeit?
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