Episode 42
[00:00:00] Welcome to The Be About Being Better podcast, where we help people make evidence based sustainable. Small changes for their health that compounded the huge shifts towards a better, more vibrant life. I'm your host Abbie Stasior, a health and life coach, future registered dietician, a master's graduate from Columbia University, and a certified intuitive eating counselor.
And I believe that we can't make lasting or meaningful change single handedly. So I'm so happy that you're here so that together you can see that a diet free, sustainable lifestyle is possible, and you can leverage that to live a better life. And remember my disclaimer, This podcast is meant to give you general information.
And it's not meant to substitute or replace medical advice, a diagnosis or serve as treatment.
Abbie: Hello. Hello y'all. I am so excited for this episode. Another one that has been highly requested. We're gonna be talking about what supplement companies don't want you to know. I get messages from y'all literally on the daily. Y'all sending me TikTok, y'all sending me different posts y'all sending me. All these different products that you're seeing online asking me, Hey, is this safe?
Is this good? Is this effective? Well, we're gonna be diving into it today. Um, we're gonna be talking about what supplement companies don't want you to know some things to look out for, and just, I just wanna increase your awareness about these things because I feel like out there they don't want you to know all this information.
They, they truly don't. And a lot of the information that. I am going to give y'all today is , what I've picked up in my studies working to be a registered dietician. And when I was studying at Columbia, we had a guest speaker come in to lecture to us. His name is Todd Cooperman and he is the president of Consumer Labs.
Which is a third party testing company. So they do a lot of independent testing of products and shows, Hey, this past inspection, this didn't, this product is worth it. This isn't. They fund their own research so that hey, this is effective. It's not, cause some of the research. On different supplements in different products, it can't really be reliably trusted because everyone, it might not be good research, but also the, the people funding the research might be the people that invented that product.
Obviously, they're not gonna put out a study that shows that it's not effective or a bad product, right? Cause that's bad advertising. So it's really good to always look at, when you're looking at studies, who is funding that study, and also look to see, okay, is this study conducted by a third party?
Testing company like Consumer Labs because they are more of a neutral independent party that can be more objective. So you're more likely to trust that research if it's coming from that source. So we had the president Todd come in to speak with us and he gave us a lot of stats of what they've seen and a lot of, um, just common issues that supplements have.
And I wanna bring that to your awareness so that as you are selecting supplements, you have a better idea of what to look for. And I hope that this will caution you from just getting some, some product on the internet because you see some influencer using it and actually being a critical consumer of these products.
Is this safe? Is this third party tested? Do I really need this? Or could I get these vitamins and minerals? Could I get these nutrients from a natural source? And I know a lot of these products say, oh, it's naturally sourced. No, I'm talking about literally go food, fruits and vegetables, some spinach, right?
Uh, maybe an apple. Like let's, let's try and at first get . Are vitamins and minerals from food sources. However, sometimes we do need to supplement. Like for me, for example, I have been vitamin D deficient in the past, so I have to be cognizant. And vitamin D isn't in a lot of food, like it's in eggs, like it's in a couple things.
But food is not a good source of vitamin D, so I need to take a supplement and I supplement every day and I can put in the show notes which one I I use that my doctor recommended. I love, it doesn't taste like anything. I put a few drops in my tongue. I put two drops on my tongue in the winter when I'm not really getting outside that much.
Don't have a lot of skin exposure. And then one drop on my tongue in the summer. And , that seems to help. Now, when I was deficient, I was putting three drops in my tongue, regardless of the season until I got my blood work checked. Okay, now we're in normal levels. And then I switched to like the two drops, one drop ratio.
Uh, but it took me, I had to like really get my levels up. Because I was so deficient. So I understand that there are situations where we need to supplement because we could be deficient or like prenatal vitamins, for example. Like we need extra of some of these things. And yes, we can get this through food, but we need to like, it's so important that we get these vital nutrients, like we need to make sure that you're getting this one way or the other.
So like taking a vitamin. Prenatal vitamins, for example, are essential and recommended during that time. So there are certain situations where, yes, supplementation is important, but our first line of defense, our first action set should be, can I get this vitamin and mineral in through food? Do I really need to supplement?
Because there are a lot of risks to supplements, so let's dive into that today. The first thing I wanna say about any supplement is that they are not regulated by the F D A, the Food and Drug Administration. So literally anything goes there not regulating these supplements. There is no registration process for any of these, so that means that.
There is variability in the contamination levels, and we'll get more into that. And there's different contamination limits. There is no sort of regulation or standardization of the ingredient identity parameters, meaning that people can just say whatever on the label doesn't, because it's not regulated, so people can just make whatever claims, put whatever amounts in there.
And say that a product is in there, even if it's not, like there's just not, everyone's trying to be truthful. What they're trying to do is get your money. So they're gonna do whatever they can to make the product sell. And if saying that, Hey, X amount of antioxidants are in there, or that this specific trending product is in there and they're not using this sweetener, they're using this one, like they're gonna do it even if it's not accurate.
So it was just something to be aware of, and their testing methods aren't standardized, so that's something that, that comes, um, you know, it's, it's a risk with any of these products because each manufacturer determines their contamination limits, their ingredient identity parameters, their testing methods.
And no manufacturer is the same. They're all kind of doing their own things. Now there are like good manufacturer practices called GMPs, um, but consumer labs, you know, when Todd came to speak with us, he said that 52% of GMP inspections, in the US , and 42% outside of the US in 2019 resulted in citations or infractions, and most commonly for not specifying or verifying the identity of an ingredient.
So maybe a product was in there, but it wasn't on the label, or something was in the product and it wasn't labeled correctly, like it wasn't the right product, or something was in there and detected, but it wasn't written on the label. Which is really scary to think about because say you have a food allergy to something like gluten, for example, like if you have a gluten allergy, if you have celiac disease and it says on the label, which they're, I mean, for these major allergens, they're really good doing that, uh, and labeling in there.
But they might not be able to label if, you know, there's cross-contamination there. But I'm just using a big allergen as an example. Although I think most products are good about that cuz it's a certified major allergen and there's like nine major allergens, but. Just for this example, say you're taking a product and it doesn't say that there's gluten on it, so you think to yourself, okay, this must be safe, and then you consume and you have a reaction.
Well, because it's not regulated and you were taking supplement, like they didn't have to certify that it was gluten free, or there might have been cross contamination in the manufacturing lab. It's like they didn't, they didn't have to certify that so, you have that risk. So it's, it can be really dangerous for people if you have an allergic reaction and you're thinking that it's safe because it's not in the ingredient list, but it's actually in the product that is not good.
So, uh, yikes. So 52% of these inspections. In the us, 42% of these inspections that have been conducted outside of the US resulted in different citations and different infractions. So these manufacturers, most of them not doing a really good job, not really being honest. So Consumer Labs, they test all sorts of products and just to name a few.
They're doing third party testing in independent testing on Apple cider vinegar, bone broth, B vitamins, calcium, C B D, caca , , coq 10, . Um, creatine, creatinine, both of those with a little different BCAAs, turmeric, digestive enzymes, extra virgin olive oil, probiotics, prebiotics, magnesium, um, ketamine, actually green tea, fish oil, multivitamins, protein powders, different herbs like milk throttle.
Ginsu, I, how you pronounce that, Ginsu. Um, so many different product that's just to name a few. These are the types of products that they're testing in their lab to see, okay, do the labels match? And looking at the product, are they contaminated with anything? What's really going on here? And they found in their testing back in 2019, that's where they had this data from.
Uh, one out of five supplements was deemed of poor quality. That is 20% of products of poor quality. That's not good. That is not good. And they said that 21% of the products that they selected for testing failed to be approved. Yikes. That's bad. And then to get even more nitty gritty, 37% of the herbal supplements, anything herb related failed 17% of their vitamins.
So like slightly better, like less than 20%. And then other supplements it was like 35%. So anywhere from like 30, 17 to 37. So like on average 20. So I would say one outta five. I feel like that's a good estimate. 20%. One outta outta five. Um, that's a Campbell. And then you don't know, like if you're at a store and you're selecting a bottle of, uh, gummy vitamins or whatever, and there's maybe eight on the shelf, well, let's make, let's round up, maybe make a 10 on the shelf.
That would mean that like two of them , are likely to be contaminated. Who knows? Are you gonna pick that to? Is the person after you gonna pick one of those two? Are you gonna pick one of the good ones? Or maybe this batch, they're all bad. Like you just don't know. And, and it's really, and it's really scary and obviously supplement companies don't want you to know about that.
They, they don't, they want to make the most amount of profit. So they're gonna do things as cheaply as possible as far as their labor, their manufacturing. They're transportation, they're packaging, they're gonna do everything they can. To make , their overhead as low as possible, and then probably double down on the advertising to sell this to you so that they can, and obviously mark up the price to get a huge profit, because that's what they care about.
They don't care about your health. They care about making a profit, and they know that these kind of gimmicky supplements sell, especially if you have smart marketing, the most common problems that come up when a product fails. Is that there's too little or none of the ingredient in the product that the label says.
So if something says, oh, there's 20 grams of this in there, there might be 15 grams, uh, or might not be in there at all. Or there might be too much, might say there's 20 grams, but maybe there's 30 grams. And it's like, all right, if so, if you're someone that's trying to stay within a certain range or if you're trying to, you know, count things like sometimes clients that work with me count how much protein they're getting, so you could be totally off going way over for your goals in a dangerous way if the labels aren't accurate, like that's what you're going off of.
That's what you're trusting is accurate. But most of the time it's not. There might be inadequate labeling to describe the ingredient, poor quality of the ingredient. Like just cuz something's in there doesn't mean that it's not like rancid or like not ripe, not the right form. Like there's a lot of forms of vitamins and not every form that's in various vitamins is the like active form.
So you might be. Like they might say there's vitamin D in there, but if it's not like vitamin D two isn't the same thing as vitamin D three. So you'll see the supplement I have in the show notes. If you're someone that needs vitamin D, it is D three cuz that's the form that we need and that we absorb the best.
So yeah, vitamin D two is just not recommended. I can't tell you how many times at the hospital these doctors would be prescribing Vitamin D two and I've had to. Correct several doctors at the hospital and tell 'em, no, no, no, we need, we need to order vitamin D three. I'm not sure where you went to medical school.
But no, they, it's not their fault. They don't get a lot of, uh, nutrition knowledge. But that's why the dieticians are so valuable in the hospital setting cuz we are up to date on, you know, what's the active form and what's not. And there's a difference between, um, folate and folic acid. So, you know, these are things that we, we wanna be cognizant of.
Cause our body absorbs different forms. So there might be that issue, but they're also, they might be expired or just not, not the right form. If there are any oils in these supplements. A lot of these supplements fail because there's a spoilage of these oils in there. Just rancid a huge reason why supplements.
Fail inspection or are not right, or because they are contaminated with heavy metals. This is kind of scary to think about, but I said these, these like manufacturers say literally don't care. And then unapproved label claims, you know, sometimes they'll say like, this is heart healthy or this, you know, Lowers your blood sugar.
Like it can't make that claim that it lowers your blood sugar. Like that's not, that's not an appropriate claim. So there are certain regulations, um, for what you can put on a label normally, like if it's a product that does get approved by the F D A, which normally food products, U S D A also reviews food labels and things like that.
And so there are certain health claims that you can and can't make. But when it comes to supplements, because they are not regulated by the fda, literally anything goes so they can say like, this is all natural. Like, mm, no, it's not. But nobody's gonna stop them because they're not regulated by any governing body.
And you know what? People probably don't want to regulate them because they're a huge money driver. You know, they bring in a lot of profit. So, and I also wanna talk about protein products and protein powders because the president of Consumer Labs, Todd, he came in and this really surprised me and I, because we all have protein powder, I think most of us consume that.
Um, so they found that, was a lot of. Misinformation on the protein powder. First of all, I will say when they're making these big protein powders, they're mixing everything in like a huge, I don't wanna say cauldron, like that's like not the right word, but a big like, not a bowl, what's the right word?
Like, Not like a big, like, I don't even know what the right word is. But if you're thinking like a factory, like a really big container to mix things in in an industrial type way, an industrial size, I think we just gotta stick with the word cauldron, because that's what's on my mind apparently.
I dunno. But it would be where they were mixing a huge batch of protein powder that would go, like when you get your protein powder in a bag, or like the collagen peptides, like a little container, like, you know, the plastic container that like, or gain comes in, whatever.
It's, so when you get that, that's one like, Serving. So it's not, it's packaged individually into those little containers or , a bag of protein powder, but it's coming from one huge serving. So if they say, okay, this batch is going to make 20 bags of protein, and each bag of protein allegedly should have 20 grams of protein in it.
Then we are going to, then let's do like 20 times 20 is 400. We are going to dump in this cauldron, 400 grams of protein and then mix up everything else that you put in there. You do that with every single, like if there, if we're gonna say there's a hundred milligrams of vitamin A. Okay. A hundred times 20 bags of protein is going to be 2000.
Grams of vitamin A. So let's dump that in the cauldron because it's the total of how many bags we're gonna be getting. Hopefully you're all follow me with this. So we're gonna mix up the cauldron, we're gonna stir it up, and then from there we're gonna divvy it up between.
The 20 bags. Now when you're stirring up all of this protein powder and all of the ingredients and then you scoop it out into 20 bags of protein, like how do you know then that every scoop that you're scooping out, cuz maybe like one serving of protein for your shake is one scooper. Maybe it's two scoops depending on the protein powder.
Like how do we know that that bag of protein is evenly distributing? The 400 grams of protein powder, the 2000 grams of vitamin A that's in there so that when your scooper goes in at home to then put the protein powder in your blender that there's, if it says there's, oh, okay, each scoop has 20 grams of protein.
How do we know that that is a hundred percent evenly distributed? Do you follow me here? I hope that this makes sense. I'm asking you these questions like you could answer me in the moment, but obviously you can't, uh, lemme know on Instagram like there's no way to control that. So when this guest speaker came in to speak with us, I was mind blown.
I'm like, here, I've been thinking this whole time that my one scoop of protein powder would have 20 grams of protein. Cuz that's what the label says. That's what the packaging says, and I've been trusting that. But there's no way to determine if one scoop or the next, there's no way to even determine, I'm sure there, unless a third party testing company is really doing this, that even the whole bag would have what it says.
Some bags might have more, some bags might have less because it's all like they're mixing it in these huge batches in that cauldron and then dividing up, okay, this makes 20 bags of protein powder, so we're gonna just divvy it up. Like how do we know that's mixed? Evenly distributed, you know that it's evenly distributed and then it's divvied up in an even accurate way when it's all these like grain particles.
Cause like, like all the protein powder looks exactly the same when it's a finished product. You don't know what's in there. You're trusting what you're putting in the like cauldron and hoping that the mixing process does its thing, but there's no way to determine that. Everything is evenly distributed.
So I'm like, oh my gosh. Wow. Like that was kind of enlightening, but also scary at the same time. So just something to be aware of. So when Consumer Lab did some testing of some protein powders, they found that one scoop had of this one protein powder they were testing, had 5.6 grams of carbohydrates. In one scoop when the label said that it was three grams of carbohydrates.
So for someone that's really trying to watch their carbohydrates and they think, oh, I'm just getting three grams of carbs, no, you're getting almost double that in your scoop. It's wild. It said on the label that there was no cholesterol.
When, when they actually tested the scoop, there was 20 milligrams of cholesterol in the scoop. So they said there wasn't, it wasn't even in there, but in fact it was, and 20 milligrams, which is significant sodium. It claimed that there was 180 milligrams of sodium in there when in reality one scoop had 325 milligrams of sodium in there.
For somebody that has hypertension, somebody that has high blood pressure, somebody that has. Any sort of kidney malfunction, something that needs to be watching their sodium, their salt. Hello. There's like, that's a significant amount over. That's not good. Um, and this is probably the scariest one. They found that in this protein powder that they were testing there was 17.6.
So let's round that up to like 18 micrograms of total arsenic. Oh boy. Which 15.6, only about 16. So 16 outta 17 micrograms was inorganic arsenic, which is the form of arsenic. That's the most toxic.
That's very concerning. That is extremely concerning. We should not be consuming arsenic, but this is what's sneaking its way into our products, and this is what the supplement. Industry does not want you to know. And here's the other thing, because you might be thinking now, okay, I need to just, all the supplements I use, I either need to get rid of them or make sure that they're all third party tested.
Well, let me tell you this, just because something on their website says, Hey, we're third party tested, does not mean that it passed the test because you could just say, oh yeah, we're third party tested. And that means that you sent your product to be third party test, but you, you don't know if that means if they passed or failed the test, but what they said is still accurate.
Yes. We send our products, all of our products for third party testing and it's like, well, What was the result of that? But a lot of people don't ask those questions. They just assume, oh, they're doing their due diligence, they're sending it off. They're trying to be objective, they're sending it for testing.
Good. A lot of people don't question it because if people say things confidently enough, and if people don't know the right questions to ask, like, I hope that, you know, if an Arban consultant starts messaging you in the dms, Beachbody coach starts messaging you in the dms. You now have enough information to be like, okay, I understand your products are third party tested, but are they passing?
And so that you can be a critical consumer of the products that you are consuming. We need to be cognizant of what we're putting in our bodies. So I think even with all of this, like I wanna make people aware, but I don't wanna like scare people too much because there is a time and place like I have protein powder.
I put collagen peptides in my coffee every single day. Y'all know, I put it in my soup, I put it in my tomato sauce, I mix it with my scrambled eggs. I'm having collagen peptides all the time, like I, I, it's a supplement, but I love it. And I like it. So I love it and I like it. I, I'm just gonna have it every single day.
And that's what it is. It's what it's, and I'm not gonna give it up. And I know that there's a certain amount of risk associated with it, and each batch that I'm getting is different. Apparently every scoop I'm scooping is different, but that's the risk that I take and I'm just gonna keep doing it. And I'm gonna keep taking my vitamin D and I'm gonna keep taking my little prenatal vitamins that I like.
And it's what it is. So, And I mean, and I like protein bars too. Same goes with these protein bars. Who knows if the label's accurate? And I'm still gonna be consuming these things because there is a time and place for convenience. And I also think if we like the taste, then we should have that every once in a while.
However, if we can lean on having whole foods like the real food. Instead of the supplement, that should be our first choice and truly treat supplements as a supplement. It is supplementing, it is filling in any gaps that your regular diet has, so you're filling in the gaps for enhancing what your, you know, baseline, what your regular nutritional profile is.
So I hope that this was helpful. Hopefully not too scary. Um, if you have any questions about supplements, keep setting me. I, you know, I love learning about supplements, seeing what's out there, seeing what y'all are being targeted, uh, with the ads and, you know, , see if I can help you, cuz a lot of the times I'll message y'all back and be like, Ooh.
Like, do not, do not worth your time, not worth your money. Not worth the risk. I mean, that could be contaminated with heavy metals. They could have in expired ingredients. You could have ingredients in there that aren't even listed on the label. So just know not everything is worth it. Most things aren't.
And you can get most things through food because there's a lot that the supplement company does not regulate, and they do not want you to know. Talk to y'all soon and I will see you next week, far next episode.
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