What most people outside the industry don't know is that most nutritional supplements offered in drug stores, health food stores, supermarkets, catalogs, over the internet, and national chains like WalMart, come from a only a handful of suppliers. These suppliers formulate products and private label them as directed by these outlets.

In order to keep costs as low as possible these suppliers buy their ingredients where they can find them the cheapest. To survive in such a competitive marketplace, product costs have to be kept down.

Many of these ingredients come from China or some other foreign nation where there is no quality standard or need for accurate labeling. Products can be old, stale, contaminated with toxic substances, or contain very little if any of the active ingredients required by a person’s body to support the healing process.

There is no government agency that monitors quality or accuracy in labeling of these products. 

Unfortunately, it is common knowledge in the industry that in spite of labeled claims, many of these products — even some with well known brand names — are of very poor quality. Independent testing has repeatedly revealed that many products have substantially less of the active ingredients that they claim on the label! Some products have NONE of the ingredients that they list on the label and are sometimes contaminated with things like heavy metals, pesticides, herbicides, or even the eggs of worms to boot.

Even when products do have accurate labels, those designed for the mass market often use ingredients that are either poorly absorbed by the body or actually interefere with metabolic processes in the body because they are cheaper. An example is Vitamin B6. Vitamin B6 is available in two forms. As pyridoxine HCL it is a cheap chemical that is poorly absorbed by the body, and may interfere with the body's ability to convert the amino acid L-Tryptophan to Seratonin or Melatonin thus causing sleep deprivation and mood disorders. The biologically active form known as pyridoxal 5-phosphate is a much more expensive supplement that is highly bioavailable, and is known to have a whole host of beneficial impacts on health, not the least of which is the converstion of homocysteine (an inflammatory compound) into harmless cysteine. This is very important for people with heart disease or arthritis.

Because the business of manufacturing nutritional supplements is so competitive, generally speaking the higher the quality of the supplement the higher will be its price. Higher quality means purer ingredients that are more absorbable by your body, fewer additives and fillers, and appropriate testing to assure that what the label says is what is in the bottle.

The biggest exception to this rule is multi-level marketing schemes. Because these deals are structured with lots of layers of mark-up, these products are often low, or no better than average quality products that have to carry a premium price to pay all the levels involved in their distribution.

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