CH. 3: No Accountablity

Chapter 3: Supplement companies lie.

In Chapter 1, I gave the illustration how a well marketed company can publish a self produced study stating they were better than the competition and you should buy their brand. In Chapter 2, I described a watershed moment in fitness history with passage of the DESHEA Act of 1994. This chapter will describe how and why companies can fabricate outlandish claims and not be held accountable for them.

First let’s sort out the difference between a prescription drug and a supplement. A prescription drug, lets say Prozac, must go through several years of modeling, study, scrutiny, human trials and then approval by the FDA. It takes hundreds of millions of dollars to conduct this research and a decade or more to get FDA approval. Once approved for usage, ongoing and rigorous testing is conducted to ensure every single pill has exactly the exact amount of ingredient as is prescribed on the bottle. The consumer can be sure that every 10mg Prozac pill in existence has exactly 10mg of Prozac in it.

Supplements are a different animal, because there is no regulation. They can make any claim they want. For example if two friends, decided to get into the supplement business all they would have to do is incorporate a business for selling. If their only product was Vitamin C this is how they could make a million dollars. Step 1. Go online and purchase bottles and a pill press. Step 2. Go to Costco and buy as much Tang Breakfast drink as they can hold in their cart. Step 3. Pour all the Tang in the bathtub, add water, mix and then let dry (3a. Drying in an oven is faster). Step 4. Press bathtub Tang into the pill press so they have a uniform shape and size. Step 5. Put 60 pills in every bottle because that’s what it will say on the label that was printed off the iMac on the kitchen table. ‘Organic’ is a good selling word to use on label. Step 6. Market bottles for $10 each on a website. Step 7. Start counting the cash. If the bottle says each pill has 200mg of Vitamin C, as long as a pill has on average somewhere near that number, then no problem. One pill could have 1mg, another 150mg, another 400mg.

Of course all these supplement companies want to make profit. If you look at the amount of money that is dedicated to R&D versus marketing and advertising you would probably vomit. Part of this marketing is to create a result and then fund a study that backs it up, (see Ch. 1). Part of this is to confuse the consumers using terms such as “Manufactured to Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) standard. Another trick is to use similar sounding terms associated with prescription drugs, Pharmaceutical Grade as opposed Pharmaceutically Manufactured.

One product, name withheld, was rocked a decade ago because an outside agency found it to have almost no nutritional value associated with its claims and it’s marketing violated guidelines of guarantees. They are still one of the biggest supplement companies in business today, with the same product name but a completely redesigned and different ingredient composition. They are widely recognized by consumers as one of the best. I have used it very recently myself.

What if I told you a widely successful supplement company, ‘Company XWY’, until it was recently sold, cornered the market on protein powder with the exact same powder sold by another company as a ‘generic’. It was made in the same plant, in the same batches and driven to different packaging and distribution locations.

I will not tell you that all supplements are crap. Most legitimate, high profile companies understand that today’s consumers are so much more educated those ten years ago. You will no longer see ‘Powdered Deer Horn’ listed in ingredients as a muscle builder, guilty of using that product. Consumers because of the DESHEA Act have the ability to choose what they want to take and they are very choosey. The product better work or act like it does.

There are some supplement manufactures that do legitimately follow the GMP and FDA guidelines for their product. When you take them you will notice a dramatic difference between them and similar products you have used in the past. To maintain those standards takes considerable money in processing and complete honesty in purity and testing. They can not compete with the hundreds of millions of dollars larger companies put into advertising. They lose shelf space and distribution rights because they would focus on quality instead of quanity.

For basic health supplementation I am very choosey. Its generally speaking a toss up on everything else, based on taste and preference to consistancy and mixing. I confess I take gels and gu's more based on taste ands consistancy rather than scientific evidence of results. Just by reading nutritional labeling its easy to recognize well tested ingredients.

If you think what your using now works, don't change it. It's better to take something than nothing. But begin to look past the marketing or position on the shelf and begin to challenge the brand. Is it the best you could be using? Not because "doctors reccommend" or "#1 selling brand in America" research the company, do they make the product or does someone else? If someone else, what else do they make and what is their reputation.