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An overflow of progress & innovation in wellness products and supplements in recent years may be enough to make your head spin. Last time I checked, we weren’t all fluent in science to know the difference between hype and the real deal. But if you’re feeling overwhelmed by the burden of choice, you’re not alone. There are thousands nutritional supplements, most of which claim to have an almost a magical or miraculous effect on your health, your skin, and your life. To make matters worse, with every new trend you hear about, you’ll read that this new supplement is exactly what you’ve been missing for optimal health!Sound familiar?!
Let us give you a little advice about where to start: Your focus should begin with safety. Supplements that make the “final cut” should be cherry-picked when it comes to criteria such as the quality of their ingredients and their safety standards - ignore the flashy ads. Finally, when it comes to marketing, looks for brands that talk about specific health benefits and quality. These are what high quality nutrition brands can brag about.
The good news is that you don’t have to be a pharmacist in order to determine the quality of a product, and you don’t have to be a marketing expert to see through the marketing gimmicks and trends. Most of us have better BS filters than we think. Today, we will focus on the most important aspects of supplement safety and the key characteristics that determine quality that will help to make your shopping much easier!
Safety and Purity Testing
Let’s start with the more complex aspect of product safety and purity evaluation: scientific testing. One of the most important indicators of the ingredient quality in a supplement is the Certificate of Analysis, a document attesting that a certain product is in accordance with its product specification. This document confirms the quality claims as a result of quality control, which is usually performed on a randomly-selected single batch of a brand’s product.