Do you take a multivitamin? Then, depending on the one you are taking, you may be putting something bad into your body. ComsumerLab.com is a company based in Westchester, N.Y.
They Tested 21 Different Brands
ConsumerLab.com conducted a study on 21 different brands of vitamins sold in the U.S. and Canada. The tests were done by an independent laboratory and their findings may be a concern to many. Only 10 met the ingredients of their labels and had quality standards. That left 11 brands that were not what the companies represented them to be.
Lead Contaminated This Vitamin
Dr. Tod Cooperman, president of the ConsumerLab.com reported that The Vitamin Shoppe Multivitamins Especially for Women was contaminated with lead. In fact, it contained more lead than Dr. Tod Cooperman had ever seen in a multivitamin before. Vitamins for women from the Vitamin Shoppe contained 15.3 micrograms of lead in their recommended two tablets per day. In California, this is 10 times the amount permitted without having a warning on the label. This multivitamin has another problem. On the label, it reported having 200 milligrams of calcium, but in their studies, it only contained 54 percent of that amount.
Other Vitamins That Failed
Another product to be careful of taking is Hero Nutritionals Yummi Bears. This is a multivitamin for children and it had 5,400 IU of Vitamin A in their daily servings. This amount is dangerous. The Institute of Medicine recommends that a safe level for children should be 2,000 IU for children ages 1 to 3 and only 3,000 IU if they are 4 to 8 years of age. If a person takes too much vitamin A, it can cause the bones to weaken. It can also cause liver abnormalities. This vitamin in high doses is not good for your body.
Some other brands of Multivitamins failed because they didn’t dissolve in the recommended time. Thirty minutes is the time that your body would benefit from the vitamins. Any longer than that and your body eliminates the rest as waste. Two of them took an hour to dissolve. This means that some of the vitamins were flushed out of the body before they could be used. Nature’s Plus Especially Yours for Women, and AARP Maturity Formula were the two that failed this test.
Eniva VIBE had only 54 percent of what the label stated for Vitamin A content. Pet-Tabs Complete Daily Vitamin-Mineral Supplement for Dogs contained lead.
The other multivitamin brands were misleading in their ingredient list. Either they had more or less, than their label listed ingredients. Some did not fully dissolve, so they passed through your body before your body absorbed all the vitamins.
To conduct this study, the ConsumerLab.com purchased different multivitamins. They took all labels off and sent them to two independent laboratories.
The Vitamins That Passed the Test
Some of the multivitamins that passed the test are Centrum Silver, One a Day Women’s, Flintstones Complete, and Members Mark.
Since there are no guidelines for vitamin manufacturers to follow, you don’t always know which are the best. David Schardt, a senior nutritionist at the Center for Science in the Public Interest has some recommendations. Choose well-known brands manufactured by a company that has a lot at stake. Buy from well-known retailers that have proven they can be trusted. Check the bottle for USP, NSF or ConsumerLab.com. Finally, the most expensive is not always the best. If they try to convince you they have all these little extra ingredients, you should put the bottle back on the shelf.
Source: Diet and nutrition- msnbc.com
