Are Your Brain Supplements Sawdust?
Let me confirm something you already know on a gut level... The supplement industry is a capitalist wild wild west, a profiteers’ paradise, a mostly unregulated free market, and smart consumers should beware. While the ubiquitous white Nutrition Facts box you see on the labeling of the packaging looks official, anyone with basic word processing software can create such a representation of the ingredients ostensibly in a product. When you realize that no one verifies that the actual individual ingredients are in a given product, you realize how much of a decision to buy and take a supplement is based upon trust. The Nutrition “Facts” When supplement companies sell products to consumers, they can count on most consumers not verifying what they are consuming. Sure, the consumers could send products off for testing at a third-party laboratory, but that costs between hundreds and thousands of dollars. While some consumer spectroscopy devices are coming to market that promise to disrupt multiple industries that prey on the voracious consumer, at the current time consumers have virtually no way of personally determining what they are actually putting in their bodies. The good news: to make almost certain that you are getting the real stuff, insist on always buying pharmaceutical-grade supplements. Why trust Pharmaceutical Grade? When a University spends six figures (or more) to conduct a major double-blind, placebo-controlled study with dozens of human participants, they verify that the compounds, ingredients, drugs, or supplements they are using are real. The potential negative repercussions of not doing so are huge... * A study conducted with illegitimate ingredients would produce inaccurate results. Scientists know that once their study is published in a journal, their colleagues at other universities will recreate their experiments to verify their findings. Not to mention, these scientists have to spend sometimes as much as $30,000 – $40,000 just on the publishing of their studies. * Many a feud between scientists and universities has its origins in one researcher challenging the conclusions another reached after a study. * Making a mistake in process or methodology during a study, referred to as having “dirty test tubes,” can result in a researcher being fired, a University’s reputation being damaged, or an organization losing its funding from the government. These guys are seriously motivated to make certain they are using the real stuff, and in their laboratories, they have the means to do so. They spend extra to get Pharmaceutical Grade and so should you! Pharmaceutical-grade manufacturers and distributors aren’t intrinsically more ethical; it’s just that they know their products are going to be tested for legitimacy and purity by their most important customers - business they stand to lose if they put out anything less than the real thing. What are the grades of supplements? Pharmaceutical Grade The purity, dissolution, and absorption of a given vitamin are third-party tested and verified to meet regulatory standards that come from the national Pharmacopeia. Pharmaceutical Grade can be obtained without a prescription, but typically they are sold by licensed health care practitioners. Companies that distribute this grade will typically be Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) certified, so look for GMP Certified on the labeling and websites of the products you order from. It’s required to be 98-99% pure; you’re never going to get 100