- wellwomennutrition
Are Your Supplements a Waste of Your Money?
A study came out this month (August 10th, 2022) that looked at 30 immune boosting supplements on Amazon to see if they were labeled accurately, meaning the listed ingredients were in fact in the supplement, in the quantity listed. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2022.26040
Here's What They Found from 30 Amazon Supplements
13 of the supplements had accurate labels
17 supplements had inaccurate labels
13 of the 17 had ingredients listed on the labels that were not even detected through analysis
9 of the 17 had substances detected that were not claimed on the product labels
5 of the 17 were misbranded and contained additional components not claimed on the label
15 products had scientific sounding claims such as “research based or supported”, “clinically studied,” scientifically proven,” “supported by gold-standard clinical studies,” and “backed by science.”
16 products had seals such as “#1 doctor recommended brand,” “third party tested,” “purity and potency,” “stimulant free,” “lab tested verified,” and “quality guaranteed.”
This is similar to another study that looked at 31 melatonin supplements of grocery store shelves. They found melatonin content varied from an egregious −83% to +478% of labeled melatonin and 70% had melatonin concentration ≤ 10% of what was claimed. Worse yet, the content of melatonin between lots of the same product varied by as much as 465%.
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