Who's Testing Your Supplements

It's so tempting... You've been getting your supplements from a company that you know and trust - a company that does clinical studies on their products and performs rigorous quality controls.

You know their products are pure, safe and effective... BUT... You're shopping in your favorite drug store or discount store and you see the same supplements for just a couple of dollars! You can't help thinking... "Wow! Here's the same stuff I've been taking for a lot less money"..."Why not save my money?"..."They must have run some quality control tests on their products"... "After all, how bad can they be?"

The answer is - pretty bad! Check out the following information from Stephen Chaney, PhD.
The events of last week illustrate just how bad. On March 2nd, 2010 the makers and sellers of fish oil supplements were sued by the Mateel Environmental Justice Foundation in California for not telling consumers that their products contained toxic levels of PCBs.
The FDA did not initiate this action 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.

Stay tuned next week for the rest of the story.
 
Mary Beth Potrykus
Mama Bear Productions