Who is testing your supplements?

Thank you to Dr. Stephen Chaney for providing this information.  This is the rest of the story from March 10.

The FDA did not initiate the law suits and force the manufacturers to take their contaminated products off the shelves.

Instead an environmental consumers group had to sue them for not including PCBs on the label! They sued them under California proposition 65 which requires a warning label whenever a product contains toxic ingredients.

The defendants in this lawsuit were Omega Protein, a Houston-based company that is the world's largest producer of omega-3 fish oil, and the many companies that they produced fish oil for - companies like Rite Aid, CVS, GNC, Now Health Group, Pharmavite, Solgar and Twinlab.

And those aren't the only ones. The Mateel Environmental Justice Foundation only tested 10 omega-3 supplements manufactured by Omega Protein to date and have found PCBs in all of them. They plan to continue testing and to add other companies to the lawsuit if their products are also contaminated.

Even scarier is that many of labels on these products said that the omega-3 supplement was treated to reduce or remove PCBs. As a consumer you were lead to believe that they were safe!  The bottom line is that the manufacturer probably didn't test for PCBs and neither did the companies selling their omega-3 supplements to the consumer.

The alternative - that they tested the products, knew that they were contaminated with PCBs and sold them to the public anyway - is even worse.  As if that weren't scary enough the FDA announced a massive recall of products containing textured vegetable protein manufactured by a company called Basic Food Flavors because of salmonella contamination.

The problem is that there are at least 56 different kinds of consumer products containing this company's textured vegetable protein - including salad dressings, dips, packaged snacks, potato chips and soup mixes (Who knew that salad dressings contained textured vegetable protein?).

That means that this recall will be huge. It will affect many foods that most people buy and use every day.

What can you do as a consumer to protect yourself?

1. Get your supplements from an established company with a reputation for quality and integrity. I would recommend choosing a company that has been around for a number of years so that you know that their reputation is based on their track record over the years rather than just on hype.
2. Make sure that they run rigorous quality controls on their products. I would choose a company that requires pharmaceutical grade quality controls on their products.
3. Make sure that they have published clinical studies on their products that prove both safety and effectiveness. Again I would recommend choosing a company that has many published clinical studies on their products rather than just one or two.

Of course, I am here to help you.  Call Mama Bear Productions at 810-813-3308.