Knowing Which Supplements are High Quality Can Be Confusing

“An important part of my role as an Integrative and Functional Registered Dietitian Nutritionist, is to keep up to date on supplements that can help my clients, their quality control, research and clinical outcomes.” — Janet Zarowitz, MS, RD, CDN

Professional grade nutrition supplement manufacturers that I work with (and whose supplements I take myself) have excellent track records. They follow rigorous quality assurance standards and certifications, are tested regularly, and even go above and beyond what is required.

They follow FDA’s Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP’s) for Dietary Supplements and are inspected by the FDA.

The manufacturers establish quality control procedures and standard operating procedures that include purity and safety of raw materials and final product, toxicology reports of contaminants or residues, stability testing, ingredient identity testing, potency testing, serious adverse event reporting and accurate labeling.

According to GMP regulations, companies must prove that the composition of their products matches the ingredients on the label.

Many Professional Grade Supplement Companies Go Above and Beyond

I work with professional supplement companies that also voluntarily exceed FDA requirements and become certified by a third-party quality assurance and compliance organization – NSF International.

NSF International is an independent organization that carries out regular audits, verifying that quality control procedures are in place. Companies in this program become GMP Registered through NSF International. (USP Verified is another independent quality assurance program that many professional supplement companies participate in; it tests for purity, quality and potency standards set by United States Pharmacopeia.)

These more robust testing protocols and quality control programs conducted by professional-grade supplement companies are costly but undeniably well worth it.

Clinical Studies, Scientific Research, Education

In addition to guaranteeing product integrity, many professional grade supplement companies also conduct or clinical studies with their products, at leading universities and medical research centers and hospitals.

Most also have scientific advisory boards and in-house research staff – comprised of experienced medical practitioners – MD’s, RN’s, RD’s, ND’s, DC’s, OD’s, and PhD’s as well as chemists and biologists.

They also provide educational programs to healthcare practitioners about latest research or protocols for different health conditions.

For more information on Using of Dietary Supplements Wisely, visit:

National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, part of the NIH (National Institutes of Health).

Homeopathy and Herbal Medicine are alternative healing treatments. Both use natural plant substances, but follow opposite healing theories.

As you can see by the products on my website, my experience is with specific botanicals and herbs. While my understanding of homeopathy is mostly conceptual, there are many who subscribe to this therapy.

Herbalism
For thousands of years (dating back to prehistoric times) and continuing to this day, naturally occurring medicinal herbs and botanicals have been used by most cultures around the world as remedies to treat diseases and symptoms.

Every plant species has its own composition of active chemical compounds, some of which are healing and others that may be toxic.

Herbal medicine subscribes to dose-response pharmacology: that the biological response to the herb varies in direct proportion to the dose or concentration of the remedy.

Homeopathy (see below) subscribes to the complete opposite: that the more dilute (less concentrated) the natural remedy is, the more effective it is.

Modern scientists have studied the active ingredients or healing compounds in many botanicals and extracted them (or created synthetic “equivalents”) to develop modern pharmacological medicines.

Herbs have varying strengths of properties — some have side effects and/or interactions with conventional pharmaceutical drugs.

Herbal medicine is an integral part of Chinese and Ayurvedic Medicine and widely followed and accepted in many European countries today.

Homeopathy
Homeopathy, a relatively “modern” medicine first created about 200 years ago by Dr. Samuel Hahnemann, also uses naturally occurring compounds including botanicals.

The belief in homeopathy is that a significant dose of a substance (plant and other natural substances) that causes disease symptoms in a healthy person will cure similar symptoms in a sick person, when given in tiny amounts.

In other words, homeopathy believes that the remedy becomes more potent the more dilute it is. (That there is an inverse relationship between the concentration and the effectiveness of the remedy.)

Homeopathy subscribes that when given the least amount of medicine, the body can trigger a healing response.

Dr. Hahnemann’s research included taking high doses of plant medicines and noting the symptoms that they produced. He then took extremely diluted versions of the same plant to treat diseases that produced similar symptoms.

He coined homeopathic principle of “similars,” and “like cures like.”

Homeopathy maintains that it’s ineffective to treat diseases by directly opposing their symptoms, (as is sometimes done in conventional medicine), because all “disease can generally be traced to some latent, deep-seated, underlying chronic, or inherited tendency.”

Homeopathy is not known to cause any side effects or interactions, because they are such a diluted form.