But what's actually in it?

For my regular readers, you know I am passionate about nutrition and supplements.

A small disclaimer, this is an opinion piece only and based on personal experience.

Over 80% of people take a supplement of some sort these days, but do you know what is in your product and where it comes from?

There are 3 main types of supplements -

1. Wholly synthetic - meaning it is entirely chemical in nature. It may be "nature identical", but it is still synthetic.
2. Isolate - meaning it can be marketed as "natural" and "concentrated". This means that it will have an isolated main ingredient, such as alpha tocopherol, which is the main ingredient of vitamin E. Vitamin E is actually a compound of 8 different ingredients, including tocopherols as well as tocotrienols!
3. Food sourced - these are generally a bit more expensive, but should contain entirely food sourced (ideally organically grown, vine ripened and non GMO food) ingredients with the main element as well as trace elements exactly as found in nature and food you would normally eat, but significantly more concentrated.

I will focus on the last type of supplement and try to explain why they are not only better, but also more expensive.

For those who regularly purchase fresh organic produce, you will understand that it is not cheap food!

A supplement supplier also needs to purchase these foods, but then every supplier and all raw material ingredients – must qualify before they can be used by meeting strict demands for purity, potency, consistency, origin and other critical quality factors.

Where something grows, how it grows, even the seed stock from which it is grown can be important determiners of quality. Raw ingredient sources meeting strict qualifications and highest standards, such as fields in the least disturbed and most natural environments available are selected. These specifications also allow assurance that all whole food concentrates and extracts are beyond organic and GMO-free.

Crops are monitored and assessed even before they are harvested. This assures the very highest quality at the outset and also allows the manufacturer to precisely track crop lots. Early monitoring is performed on fruits, vegetables and grains and all other materials.

Qualified ingredient suppliers also carefully select the very best time of the year to harvest crops in order to ensure both quality and the highest nutrient content. Because of these same demanding standards, crops are continually analyzed for nutrient content and quality leading up to processing.

How a crop is processed is another key determiner of quality. That is why only state of the art equipment is used that guarantees the purest extractions and concentrates with an absolute minimum of processed alteration. Purity and potency are crucial to maintaining quality. All ingredients are held under strict quarantine and cannot be released for use until laboratory tests for purity and potency are verified.

Once the raw materials are processed to accepted specifications, they are delivered to socially responsible manufacturing facilities. These facilities are routinely audited to ensure that they are operating in a manner that guarantees the highest quality manufacturing with the lowest environmental burden. State of the art equipment combines various raw materials into different forms with maximum efficiency guaranteeing consistency from batch to batch.

All final products are tested and certified by the most reliable and validated scientific methods to ensure safety, quality and effectiveness. These methods are very important, but more importantly are the highly trained and skilled scientists that perform them that ensures that all quality standards for purity and potency are met.

Ongoing inspection and sample retention guarantee a future of quality. Meticulous inspection continues on the packaging line, and production samples are collected and retained to facilitate future tracking.

In my opinion therefore, it is good to do as much research as possible on the manufacturer of the products you are ultimately trusting your life to. After all, you are taking a supplement to improve your health, don't you want to know what is in the product you are swallowing, or do you just blindly trust the marketing that goes along with the product on the store shelf?

I have used numerous types of supplements over the years with varying degrees of efficacy. Working in the medical field, I also get to see numerous different types of products, both nutrition as well as medication. Being skeptical by nature, I have learned to do due diligence and not just trust the product label.

If you are serious about your health, I would suggest you do the same.

If you feel you don't have the time for the research, you are welcome to reach out to me and I will happily chat to you about the products I use that have passed the criteria I have written about here.