Natural-Wellness

Most of us have taken supplements at one time in our life or another. I have taken them for most of my life. Sometimes they helped, sometimes they hurt and sometimes they did nothing. I used to think that it was just that “I wasn’t taking enough” or that I needed something different. It’s just recently that I have re-discovered that if you take the right supplement, you don’t have to take mega doses of it.

So with all the advertising out there for this vitamin and that vitamin, how do you tell which one is the best? Here are 6 tips to help you choose.

1. Find a company that has been in business for a long time. There may be nothing wrong with a new company but with all the press about steroids and stimulants, lead, etc, it’s better to wait it out and see what happens.
2. Research the company. It’s easy to do on the internet. Just type the company name+FDA in google and read some of the articles that come up. If a company has been cited by the FDA for making false or medical claims or if they have had a product recall, it will come up in the search.
3. Call the company and ask whether they do clinical studies on their own products. There are a few companies that do and those are the companies that will have the best supplements available. Most companies take already existing studies and use them to justify their product. There is no guarantee that the ingredients used in that companies products are as good as the ones in the study or that their processing is the same.
4. While you are on the phone ask if their supplements are made in a pharmaceutical grade plant. Food supplements may or may not be made in a plant where cleanliness and filtration is controlled. Many incidences of cross contamination from the product that was made before in the same plant occur each year.
5. Check the guarantee. Do they guarantee their products 100%? Do they guarantee that the vitamins and minerals that are listed on the label are what you get when you take the first one? Probiotics are a good example of this. If you read the small print, you will find that they often guarantee that there were so many million live lactobacillus or bifidus when manufactured. What you get when you take the actual supplement may be nothing as they are fragile.
6. Are the supplements all natural? Do they contain starch, artificial colors, or other fillers? Do they dissolve in cool water within 15 minutes? The hard coating on many vitamins does not dissolve quickly enough to be used by the body and in some cases, what goes in one end, comes out the other intact.

After having tried many different supplements over the years, I always go back to my company. You can check out my company and see what you think.

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