Antioxidant Supplements

Antioxidant supplements can provide a convenient way to take a variety of supplemental nutrients from a single product to prevent vitamin or mineral deficiencies, as well as to achieve higher intakes of beneficial nutrients.

In the current state of the vitamin and nutritional supplement industry it can be difficult to decide which supplements will provide real health protection and improvement benefits and which are simply “me too” products designed primarily to ride the wave of consumer interest in preventative health, but which provide no substantial health benefit.

To understand the need for consumers to be informed about vitamin and nutritional supplements, you must understand the regulatory environment that currently exists in the vitamin supplement industry in the United States.

Do Supplement Companies Regulate Themselves?

In October of 1994, President Clinton signed into law the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA).

The DSHEA was written to help empower American consumers to make choices about their own preventative healthcare strategies, and hopefully this would reduce the country’s health care expenses.

Under the DSHEA it was decided that nutritional supplements would continue to be regulated as a food product rather than the more restrictive regulations that drugs fall under.

While this made antioxidant supplements widely available it also allowed nutritional supplement manufacturers to practically regulate themselves, since there was no agreed upon standard of good manufacturing practice and no government pressure to be true to the label on their products.

It was’t until March of 2003, nine years after the DSHEA became law, that the FDA proposed new regulations to require current good manufacturing practices (CGMPs) in the manufacturing, packing, and holding of multi vitamin and dietary supplements.

According to the FDA, this is what prompted the new regulation proposal:

“In recent years, analyses of dietary supplements by a private sector laboratory suggest that a substantial number of dietary supplement products analyzed may not contain the amounts of dietary ingredients that would be expected to be found based on their product labels. For example”:

“Five of 18 soy and/or red clover-containing products were found to contain only 50 percent to 80 percent of the declared amounts of isoflavones”.

“Of 25 probiotic products tested, 8 contained less than 1 percent of the claimed number of live bacteria or the number of bacteria that would be expected to be found in such a product”.

The proposed rule would, for the first time, establish standards to ensure that multi vitamin supplements and dietary ingredients are not adulterated with contaminants or impurities, and are labeled to accurately to reflect the active ingredients and other ingredients in the product.

The proposed new regulations will be phased in over the next three years so as not to disrupt the production of nutritional supplements.

What this means is that we can’t count on any outside agency to guarantee that the multi vitamin supplements we use will be free of contamination or will contain the ingredients on the label!

Consumers are still in the position of having to trust vitamin supplement manufacturers to regulate themselves, even though it’s been verified that there are product contamination and other problems.

Choosing Antioxidant Supplements

One of your first steps in shopping for a multi vitamin should be to check to see if the product you’re considering contains 100% of the daily value(DV) for most of the main nutrient groups. For some nutrients like Calcium, the DV won’t all fit in a single multi vitamin, so this is another point to take into consideration.

Also be aware that the recommended daily allowance (RDA) usually reflects only the nutrient amounts neccessary to sustain life and may be different from the amount needed for theraputic health benefits.

If you have specific health or lifestyle issues, keep these in mind while shopping for multi vitamins and nutritional supplements. For example, if you’re under stress on an ongoing, daily basis, the body breaks down protein at an amazing rate, so you might consider a specific multi vitamin formula to address the issue.

If you have heart or cardiovascular issues, there are antioxidant supplement formulas that focus on this particular area.

Some More Important Points to Consider:

Potency

The potency of nutrients in multi vitamin and mineral supplements can vary considerably. In some cases there is a choice between natural and synthetic. The natural versions, (particularly vitamins) are much more potent than their synthetic counterparts (sometimes more than double).

Companies willing to give a full disclosure and description of their ingredients have usually put more effort and research into their product.

For example, instead of just saying “Calcium” the label should be more detailed like this: “Calcium (from 2430 mg Citrate, Malate)”. This description indicates that higher quality ingredients and more up-to-date research was used for the product.

Synergy

In multivitamin and mineral supplements the importance of synergy between nutrients cannot be overstated. Countless clinical trials have clearly established that nutrients working in harmony together can improve their individual effectiveness up to ten fold or more. In addition, many nutrients work together to create other substances.

Many nutritional supplements are not scientifically formulated. They are simply “thrown together” creating an unbalanced, incomplete, and non-synergistic product, offering little or no benefit.

When designing any vitamin or mineral supplement a high level of scientific knowledge is essential to ensure that all components will work together without canceling each other out.

Manufacturing

Most nutritional supplements are produced in less than optimal facilities. Not only that, but the ingredients are not subject to tests that are crucial to ensure there is no contamination, and that they are 100% pure and of acceptable quality.

It’s been verified by the independent product testing of consumerlab that many supplements do not contain what is stated on their label. This is due in part to the very relaxed regulatory environment governing the manufacture of dietary supplements in the USA and many other countries. There is no governmental pressure to be true to label.

Additionally many vitamin and mineral supplements are mass produced for supplement suppliers on a ‘private label’ basis. This tends to create circumstances in which manufacturers will make short cuts by substituting cheaper ingredients because their customers are often unaware of it.

Safety

Even though most dietary supplements are natural you have to be cautious that you don’t take an excess of some nutrients – particularly minerals. Many people inadvertently do so!

To get all of the nutrients mentioned above, as well as all of the nutrients listed below, such as:

* Vitamin D
* Minerals, including selenium, calcium, magnesium, potassium and zinc
* Trace elements, including iodine and molybdenum
* Enzymes, including amylase and lipase
* Other amino acids, including ATP, arginine, lysine, proline and taurine
* Carotenoids (vegetable forms of the A-vitamins)
* Herbal extracts like green tea and ginkgo biloba

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