Supplement Industry Crash Out

I saw an ad for a supplement last night that was 100% lies, and it pushed me over the edge, and I crashed out. Now you all get to join me on my crash out. Please enjoy this edition of me losing my mind due to repeated, daily exposure to stupidity.

Contemplating my life choices

First up is Amazon facing no penalties, fines, or consequences for continuously selling products that are completely mislabeled, fraudulent, counterfeit, and every other type of wrong.

How the hell is it legal to sell a product labeled one thing, even if it’s not that product? Despite being repeatedly informed of this and given the test results, Amazon takes no action and leaves the products up. If someone gave us good data that something we were selling had problems, we would take the products down immediately and begin investigating it, which is precisely what a company should do. Imagine if you went to the store and bought butter, but inside the package was bread. Wouldn’t a grocery store get in some trouble for doing that over and over again? Not Amazon, though; apparently, they have zero responsibility to ensure that what they are selling is what they claim it is. Also, screw the FDA, as well, because all the insane issues found in supplements on Amazon have been sent to them over and over again, and they refuse to take any action to remedy the situation. For example, it recently came out that 22 out of 23 St. John’s Wort products tested failed for various reasons, including a bunch of them containing a synthetic dye. Many of them claimed to be third-party tested. Yet, all of these products are still up on the website. You have to be nuts to buy supplements on Amazon, with all the issues, as it is a complete roll of the dice as to whether you are getting a real product or not. You wouldn’t tolerate that from the grocery store, so don’t do it with a website. You can read more about the problems with supplements on Amazon here.

Next up is the rise of claims that people should look for third-party testing as the most important measure of quality in a supplement. I am astonished at how fast this nonsense has grown. Third-party testing is just the latest marketing gimmick that lets companies hide their issues. I say this as a company selling lots of products that are third-party tested: IT DOES NOT MEAN ANYTHING! We don’t use it as a measure of quality or safety, and neither should you. All it does is give people a false sense of security and provide a great marketing opportunity. My hatred for marketing departments grows daily. 

Here are just a few of the problems:

• People don’t know what should be tested and which testing methods to use. Many ingredients need specialized testing, and if you don’t know what that is, how can you tell if the correct method was used? It’s easy for a company to use the wrong testing method (on purpose or because they don’t actually know what the right one is), and then the product shows it is free of a certain contaminant when it may still contain it because the wrong method was used.

• A ton of them are fake and altered, which is really easy to do with basic editing software or AI.

  • Companies will use a test result from a different company with a similar product, then replace the information with their own.

  • Other companies make fake ones, and most people have no way of telling the difference. 

• Nearly all of them are incomplete. For example, they almost always have no solvent residue or adulteration testing listed.

• Companies will conduct third-party testing on just one lot and then use third-party testing marketing for all future lots.

• Most companies will do third-party testing for one or two things, but not for all the things that should be tested. Passing one quality measure does not make something a good product. 

You can read more about the problems with third-party testing here; this blog will show what to look for in terms of quality control, and this article will show you what to look for in sourcing.

Next up is crazy amounts of claimed ingredients in a product serving size. If you have a 500 mg tablet, you can’t have over 2000 mg of material in it. It’s just not physically possible, yet every day I get requests to order or carry products that make those very claims. Shockingly, most of those products are found on Amazon and claim to be third-party tested. This is where I usually bang my head on the desk repeatedly to try and make the pain go away.

For example:

We purchased this product from Amazon. It claims to have 2180 milligrams of ingredients, plus fillers, including 2000 milligrams of vitamin C, in each tablet. Yet, when we weigh the pills (which don’t look like the ones in the picture), they weigh between 1100 and 1200 milligrams. It is not possible to have 2180 mg of ingredients in a pill weighing only 1100-1200 mg. It even shows it’s third-party tested, which is weird, since that product clearly has issues, and I keep being told third-party testing is the key to quality.  Yet, Amazon takes no action to remove products like this. Time for my lobotomy. 

Making a return to haunt my dreams are mushroom supplements with no mushroom fruiting bodies. I hate it here so much. If a company puts a picture of a mushroom fruiting body on the label, it should have that mushroom fruiting body in it. Is that such a crazy take? 

See that nice big red reishi mushroom on the front of that package? That’s the fruiting body of the mushroom. Guess what’s not in that product? Reishi mushroom fruiting body. I want to stick a hot poker in my eyes whenever I see these things. Unfortunately, because of what I do for a living, I have to see crap like this every day. You can read more about what to look for in mushroom supplements here.

A recurring daily nightmare for me is fake whole food vitamins. A whole food supplement should not contain or use synthetic and isolated vitamins and minerals at any time during the production process. The nutrients in it should only be in the foods used. Every day, my eyes are subjected to a new fake whole food supplement. I would estimate that over 90% of the supplements that claim to be whole food contain synthetic or isolated vitamins and minerals. For example, we typed in "whole food vitamins" into the Amazon search bar and couldn’t find a single multivitamin that didn’t use or contain synthetic or isolated vitamins and minerals on the entire first page. They were all super happy to market themselves as whole-food vitamins, though. What a time to be alive. You can read more about how to tell if a supplement is whole food or not here. 

Here are some current crashout honorable mentions:

• White colostrum powder.

  • Properly made colostrum is golden yellow, not white. The fact that the best-selling colostrum powder is white is one of the most infuriating things. It has had a bunch of beneficial things stripped out of it. You can read what to look for in a colostrum supplement here.

  • White label and private label

    • The sheer volume of companies selling the exact same product, made by the same company, is mind-boggling. Rather than invest in making unique or better products, they slap their label on the identical product made for thousands of companies and stores, then spend their entire budget marketing how much better it is than the eight bajillion identical products. It is funny seeing companies market themselves in an ad versus the same product with another company's label. 

    • You can read more about this practice here. 

  • Liposomal supplement pills and powders

    • You cannot have a liposomal supplement in a pill or powder. It is no longer a liposome; instead, it is a lipid powder. Lipid powders do not offer the advantages that liposomal supplements do, and the fact that companies can keep labeling them as liposomal supplements when they are most certainly not makes me want to go for that third lobotomy. You can read about liposomal supplements here.

I hope my crash out made you all laugh a bit and that you have a much better day than my brain is having!