The following is an updated version of a blog we published several years back. From conversations with clients and prospective clients, I think it is time to talk about this again.
Imagine a world where you don’t need keys for your car or house, you don’t have to password protect your bank account, you don’t need anti-virus or anti-spy software, and you don’t need insurance adjusters, bank examiners, or an EPA or FDA.
In this world, everyone is honest with no desire to make a personal gain at the expense of anyone else and the vitamin label you read tells you exactly what’s in the bottle – no more, no less.
In the real world we live in, we have to have safeguards at every level because, let’s face it, people cheat. In some industries, the third party agencies watch over your interests to some level, and in others you are on your own.
For example, some biologists wanted to check some mainstream fish markets in Florida to see what kind of fish were actually being sold. They found that what was being sold as Atlantic snapper was really only about 25% snapper of any variety. About half of the fish sold as snapper were not even found in American waters.
In the world of vitamins, no third party is watching out for you. There is virtually no way for you to know for sure if the ingredients listed are really in that bottle and, worst of all, you have no way of knowing if the ingredients include things you don’t want such as lead, mercury, arsenic, cadmium, or even uranium.
Your only defense is to buy from the most reputable brands you can find from the most reputable sellers. Most of the time these will not be the cheapest brands with the word “cost” in their name and they won’t be from the cheapest online sellers.
We have found that some, like NeuroScience and other great brand-name products, are being sold on the big sites that begin with an “A” or an “E” for less than wholesale prices. Sometimes people call and ask why our labels don’t look like the labels from those sources that they just purchased. The most probable reason is that those are not genuine products, as it would be really easy to create a counterfeit and pass these off on the bargain-hunting public as the real thing. You are buying these important supplements for a reason and who knows what is really in those amazingly cheap versions, sometimes with funny labels.
NeuroScience has learned that they have to assay every single batch of herbs from even previously reputable sources. They will sometimes have to go through several batches to find one good one. They might find that either the active ingredients are too sparse or that it contains too much of some type of contaminant. You might have complained that NeuroScience products are too expensive, but you now understand why. It would be easier to let a few of these marginal batches slide because they know you can’t tell by looking at the label. Believe me when I say that the majority of companies will not use the same diligence as NeuroScience, and that is one good reason we carry their line.
Another example is fish oil. The more reputable companies such as Metagenics supplements, NuMedica, and Karuna pay more for their fish oil and sell the lower-quality rejected batches to brokers who pass it on to the companies like I mentioned before with “cost” in their name.
At OVitaminPro, we can sell you any brand of supplement, but will only offer the ones that we trust and that we would take ourselves. You can count on us.
