Are Your Supplements Worth the Price You Paid?

Are Your Supplements Worth the Price You Paid?

Not all supplements are created equally. There are generally three FDA grades of nutritional supplements based on the quality of the ingredients they contain.

FEED GRADE:
These are produced for veterinary use.

FOOD GRADE:
These are typically sold in health food stores, retail pharmacies and grocery stores. You cannot rely on these to be quality controlled through testing for absorption, dissolution, purity or potency. Additionally, these supplements do not always have the same concentrations of active ingredients as pharmaceutical grade. Food Grade supplements can have up to 30% impurities, fillers and binders. These can be bleached or radiated to kill any contaminants. Up to 88 different chemicals can be added to these supplements and none of them have to be included on the label. Food Grade supplements are often processed with high heat which is not good for oily supplements.

PHARMACEUTICAL GRADE:
These are the highest quality grade of vitamins and supplements. The purity, dissolution and absorption meet the highest regulatory standards verified by an outside lab. Pharmaceutical Grade supplements must be 98-99% pure, meaning they cannot be full of fillers and binders. To meet Pharmaceutical Grade standards, raw ingredients must be quarantined before production. Pharmaceutical Grade supplements undergo testing at several stages throughout the process for purity and potency and are typically only sold by a licensed health care provider, such as a physician or Compounding Pharmacy.

Some of the most popular Pharmaceutical Grade supplements are:
Metagenics
Thorne Research
Nordic Naturals
Pharmacy Solutions
Protocol
Twin Labs
Xymogen
Enzymatic Therapy
Pure Encapsulations
Gaia Herbs
Designs for Health
Douglas Labs
Integrative Therapeutics
DiVinci Labs
Transformation Enzymes
Master Supplements
Nu Medica

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