The advice and informational content does not necessarily represent the views of mother's market and kitchen mother's recommends consulting your health professional for your personal medical condition.

Hello, I'm Kimberly King, and welcome to the mother's market radio show, a show dedicated to the Truth, Beauty and Goodness of the human condition. On today's show, we're gonna get some inside information on the secrets of vitamin makers, tell you what goes on into making and getting approval for dietary supplements, and help you know what to look for the next time you shop for vitamins less, we'll tell you what's happening around town and give you a chance to win a 100 gift card. But first up, let's go behind the curtain, yes, it's time to lift the veil on these vitamin companies and find out the truth... Sounds interesting, right.

And we welcome back board certified clinical nutritionist, Neil even. Neil is the nutrition education manager and a formula Tor for now foods. He has a diplomate in advanced nutritional laboratory assessment, and as a professional member of the international and American associations of clinical nutritionists is the past president of the American Nutrition Association, and revere fortunate to be welcoming him to the mother's market radio show. Neil, how are you?

Great, Hakim.

Before we get to today's topic, can you fill in our audience on your work and its mission... Sure, I'm a nutrition educator for now foods and a formula or so I'm working on those aspects of formulating and communicating the formulas, but I'm also involved in the role of sign-offs or approvals for good manufacturing practices that now govern all manufacturers of dietary supplements in the United States, and what that means is we must follow federal regulations, would make us do various things to make sure that our products are both safe and effective and that what is on the label is really in the product, so it's a very important thing that people should note that when you hear in the media sometimes the often repeated line that dietary supplements are unregulated, there is a hidden message missing, what the people are really intend to say is they are not regulated like drugs, there's an implication that dietary supplements need to be regulated, just like drugs, and because they're in a bottle in their pills often does not make them... Drugs does not give them the same safety record as drugs, which is pretty abysmal, and there's no reason to assume that they're dangerous when in fact, all the studies, all the government reports show that they are not at all dangerous, in my opinion, dietary supplements are the safest thing you put in your mouth, they're safer than going and eating a meal, whether at home or in a restaurant, they're safer than drinking a bottle of water, and in terms of government statistics, Poison Control statistics, zero deaths from dietary supplements in the last full year on record, when there's admittedly over 100000 deaths from drugs that are used as prescribed and probably triple that from drugs that are not prescribed properly... Or not used as prescribed.

Correct, and it's more than likely it's all how you manage them. Right, that's what you're here to talk about. Well, today we're talking about how the secrets of Vitamin makers, and we wanna talk about then we wanted to get started, the legal aspects, what laws and regulations govern the safety and the quality of dietary supplements... Well, that's an important point, because many critics of the dietary supplement industry and the manufacturers say that a law passed in 1994 called the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act or desha deregulated dietary supplements. In fact, it's absolutely provable that it gave the FDA even more power to impose rules on dietary supplement companies, and in fact, the good manufacturing practices or GPS I mentioned earlier, were authorized by that law and the FDA is now implemented that and is restricting greatly. The way that dietary Superman factors operates, and it includes, we have to audit our suppliers of raw materials to make sure that they are following good manufacturing practices, we have to test incoming materials for safety and identity, we have to document everything we do with sinus by multiple people including Quality Control, and purchasing our quality control and research and development, quality control and production, there's a redundancy and an audit-able paper trail for everything that's done when we produce a product, you can look at the last number and code on the bottom of the bottle, and we know what machine it was run on, what time of day it was run, who was operating the machine, what product was run in the machine before that, what product was running the machine after that, if there was any maintenance that machine... During or before that, the records are on there, the sanitation of the machines, all these things are being controlled as well as safety testing, identity testing, including finished products. So it also controlled the label claims, by the way, so when you see these outrageous claims that a vitamin will help cure your disease, they're blatantly illegal, law is also been that you have anything in the product that's not on the label, and when you hear about products that are adulterated with steroids or other drugs, erectile dysfunction drugs are often one target, steroids that are often in sports products, not often, but when the government complains about them, they're already illegal, and my argument is, if someone's breaking the law is the solution to impose new rules, if you're driving down the highway at 55 and someone passes you at 90, is the solution to put in a stop sign every mile or to lower the speed limit to 45, well that... Correct that guy going 90. they know they're breaking along, enforced the law, you don't need new laws...

Wow, well, testing standards apply to the dietary supplement industry and who sets them... I guess would be the next question.

Yeah, that's a little bit of a mixed bag because while the government requires safety and identity testing, they require each company to validate their own systems for doing that to justify what they're doing, so there's not a standard, and people have asked the FDA to put down clear standards and say it's only reasonable that you give us a standard that to apply, and the government doesn't do that, they're kind of standing back and seeing what everyone does, and it's a little strange because it gives the FDA a little more power to be arbitrary, their inspector doesn't have a clear rule and can kind of make up rules or enforce it in the way they interpret it, and until there's enough experience and enough guidance from above and the agency, there is gonna be a difference in how the audits by the FDA and the agency regulation is applied in real life. But that doesn't mean they don't have the authority to regulate. They clearly do, they have the authority to come in, just like an IRS audit, to go into a company and spend a week there going through the records and watching them operate, and with the food safety law that just got passed, they also have the authority to order recalls of products that are mislabeled or adulterated, so the testing practices, you got into a little bit about what was illegal, but universally required though, what are some of the other testing options?

Well, when they say you have to test for identity, there's often unnatural products, not a standardized test, so you might pick for one company one test and another company might test another way, and when some of these consumer organizations or other groups might wanna test something that doesn't have a standardized test. They might not be using the same test that the manufacturer has validated is a reasonable test, but there's no official tests, so they might use one instrumentation at one company and a different kind of instrumentation in another where they're getting different types of results, and they're both legitimate. But until some standard is recognized, then there can be different ways of doing it, and one solution is for companies to put on their label or their website, how they're testing, so it's open, and actually now food is in the process of adding that to our website, adding information about how each product is tested, so consumers will kind of have an open view of what we're doing and can compare it to other companies where that type of thing is not normally on product labels, but we wanna expand our website and we're actually in process of doing that, to give that information to consumers so they have what they need. Excellent.

Well, I think this is excellent information and it's great that you're exposing that, especially on your website and... Wonderful, great information. No, right now, we're gonna take a quick break. More of mother's market radio show in a minute. So stay with us, we'll be right back.

Welcome back to the mother's market radio show, and we wanna take the time to remind you that if you missed any portion of today's show, you can find us on iTunes by searching mother's market, or you can download the podcast from our websites, mother's market dot com, click on the link for radio and listen to our past shows, but you can always download our Healthy Recipes and money savings coupons, all available at mother's market dot com. And now back to our interview with board certified nutritionists, you live in from now foods, we're talking about some of the secrets to vitamin makers, so Neil, without any defined standards by the FDA, what is the solution?

Well, the industry is trying to step in and help create a solution to create some of these standards, for example, now, food scientists have published methods for saying glucosamine, dreamer, jenin. We just published a method on looking for adulterated that are often used in... Well, not often, but there are sometimes used in certain supplements, the erectile dysfunction drug is the steroids and so forth, where they should not be in the products, they are illegally marketed drugs rather than dietary supplements by definition.

So if you can find those in the raw materials, then you're not gonna make products that are contaminated with these type of things, if there's a published standard, and we're also working with the AOA, the organization of analytical commit, which works under FDA mandate to methods for measuring dietary supplements for identifying them and quantifying them, their strength and potency, etcetera, so the AOC Journal publishes methods as well, and now scientists have also been involved in not only publishing our own methods, but validating other people's methods to show that it's replicable and a narrow range of results where it's a legitimate robust test, so the industry is trying to step in and create standards, but it's a slow process, it often takes two or three years for this publication thing to go through and to validate these things where they become official.

So for example, the official method close to me was the now foods methods that we developed.

I think we're the only vitamin maker who actually hired a PhD scientists who developed methods, but when we buy a raw material, we are required by the FDA and by federal regulations to be able to prove, if we're challenged that we have that amount in that product through the expiration date.

So if they pick up a bottle off the shelf and test it, we have to show them that we have a validated test method, whether there's a standard one or not, and that we have the right amount of the right thing in there and nothing that doesn't belong there, also regarding safety, heavy metal testing is becoming more common, but it's still not a usual type of test that people use micro-testing, testing for microbiological contamination is not a common thing, but now foods does that routinely on a raw materials also. And more and more companies do that.

So looking at the safety and efficacy of the raw materials is the responsibility of the manufacturer, but they have to a document that if they're audited and many companies have third-party auditors as well as the FDA auditing them, which again, helps them to perfect their practice of documenting everything and doing everything properly that they're following these strict, good manufacturing practices that assure the quality of the safety and the efficacy of their products.

Well, thank goodness that you have all of these folks to back you up there, but... Okay, so we were talking about raw materials, where are raw material source from and what are their greatest concerns?

Well, raw materials come from all over the world, they come from where they come from, in many cases, we have super fruit coming from South America or from Hawaii or from Asia, for example, we have materials coming from Australia from a lot of the normal vitamins minerals and the very simple things that are used in vitamins come from the forest, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, China are the main sources of them... There's herbs that come from Europe or from Siberia or from India. The important thing is that you have strict specifications, that you have tests to make sure that those specifications are met and that your products are safe and are what they say they're gonna be, and it doesn't matter if they're coming from China or Iowa, and in fact... Because of the strict of vendors that now food does, we have fewer rejections of raw materials from Chinese suppliers then from American suppliers, and we've all seen in America that there's been contaminated peanuts with toxins in there and contaminated sprouts and everything, just 'cause I made in America it doesn't necessarily mean it's safe and just 'cause it's made in China doesn't necessarily mean it's unsafe, we treat everyone like their China, and we test and re-test and qualify our vendors and audit them, and we wanna make sure that what we're producing is the highest quality and we wanna be open on our labels and our website, so people know what we're doing, so they can judge for themselves if it's good enough for them. Excellent.

What are some of the environmental contaminants and economic adultery that manufacturers have to test for?

Well, there's about 70 of these things that we're looking for that are known to us, and we have scientists on the industry panels and the AOC panel and things like that, where we know what the common adulterated are, for example. There's a nerve called Gino that is often used for circulation memory, that kind of thing.

One of the constituents that occur naturally in Gino is a bio-flavonoid called routine, which is very healthy, but if you spike Gino with routine because it's cheaper than the Gino, you're no longer getting the kind of into that you're expecting to get... You're getting the wrong thing. And in fact, we're looking for the proportions of these constituents to make sure that it matches our standard and that it's not spite, we're also looking for melamine and protein, and that was something that came up with the Chinese spiking their dairy products, not that we're buying dairy products from them, but melamine, something that we're looking for routinely in our dairy products and our proteins to make sure that they've not been spiked with this... These are economic adulterers, sometimes they're toxic, sometimes they're even healthy, but if they're not what the raw material is supposed to be, and it's not gonna make our label accurate, we wanna screen for it and we wanna find it... Well, that's great, that's wonderful that you're doing that, and that's being 100% accountable, what are the trademarked ingredients and how do they relate to the product quality?

Yeah, that's actually a good indicator because if you wanna look at the difference between brands, the easiest way to detect the difference is to take the same raw material and see how each brand is offering it, so if you take a trademark ingredient and it has a trademark symbol, most labels will say, trademark of such and such company, it's like if you buy a car and you wanna swap the stereo and you wanna put a Sony stereo or a pioneer stereo or whatever, Brandon, you can swap that stereo and it's the Sony stereo. It comes from Sony, it doesn't... Manitoba a Ford or a MASA or whatever. And it's the same radio and the trademark Ingredients are the same thing for dietary supplements, we're buying a branded material that comes from a single supplier, they have a monopoly on that name and that product, and so the raw material is not different in any brand that offers it... And there's brands of Chromium and anti-oxidants and various other things that you can buy that are brand names, they do their own advertising, they do testing, they do clinical trials on their products to create a demand, and they sell to various companies like us.

So we offer it and put it out on the market, and many other brands might have the exact same branded raw material ingredient, and so there is no difference in quality between the active ingredient in these products, if there's a difference in price, if there's a difference in what is formulated with... If one's in a cap and one's in a gelatin cap, if one uses starch as a base and the other uses a more natural base, that synergistic, those are characteristics of the company's values and what it's doing, and for consumers, this is an easy way to look at apple to apple comparison of price, because if the price is different, it's not because of the quality of the active ingredients, it's because of the overhead and profit structures of that company, and you could easily see how they're different by looking at those single ingredient branded materials.

Absolutely.

Wow. What other certifications are relevant to manufacturing dietary supplements?

Well, one is organic certification, and a lot of companies might say organic on the label, and you're required to follow the Department of Agriculture natural organic program standard, the NP Standard, and with the rules, but just like the good manufacturing practices, have a party certified who reviews and audits for you. So does the organic program, and there are several certifies authorized by the USDA to certify these materials, and what this means is they audit the paper trail from farm to us and including our practices to make sure that organics are segregated throughout and are not gonna be mixed up with conventional foods and ingredients, so it's an assurance to the consumer that someone besides us is verifying that the material is what we are saying it is in terms of being organic, and the same would go for kosher, where a kosher certified would look at the plant practices and certify a product, they're certifies for quality and various other things, so the third party certifications are another level of assurance to the consumer that someone is auditing and watching what the manufacturer does and you're not just taking their word for it.

So that's the bottom line is, yeah, that's... Well, an excellent... That's great, I love what you guys are doing. And it's about time, and I love that it's 100% accountable.

That's good for you. Well, thank you so very much for your time, we look forward to having you on again. In the mean time, you can catch more of Neil by reading his blog at honest nutrition dot com, you can like him on his honest nutrition Facebook page and follow him on his Twitter account at Neil I live in and learn more about his expert nutritional advice at food dot com, we look forward to our next visit. Thank you, thank you. Or if you've ever enjoyed the delicious food inside our kitchen, you may have tried this tasty dish, now you can make it yourself, this recipe is for black being chilly with lime cream sauce. The preparation time is about 30 minutes and it makes six servings, you start with a pound of cooked black beans, one half cup, white anion diced, one half cup, green belper diced, one half cup, red bell pepper diced, one cup, fresh diced tomatoes, two tablespoons, olive oil, one tablespoon human, three cloves of garlic peeled and missed, one teaspoon chilly powder, one teaspoon paprika, one teaspoon oregano, one teaspoon Tabasco sauce, one bunch of fresh cilantro mint and two cups of tomato pre-canned, there's also lime cream sauce, which contains one cup of low fat cream, the juice from one line and great exist from half of a lime, so the first step is to clean your black beans and place them on a pot filled three quarters of the way with water and you cook them on the stove over a low fire for approximately one hour or until soft in the middle and drain the water and set your black beans aside and in the pot, you're going to place the olive oil and add the garlic spices until fragrant at all the vegetables and cook 58 minutes or until tender. Then add back in the black beans, the tomato, PRA and Tabasco, allow all the ingredients to simmer over low fire for 25 minutes, serve with two table spoons of the Limerick on the top and it goes great with Mexican style rice and a salad. This is black being chilly with lime cream sauce by mother's Marketing kitchen.

Thanks for listening to the mother's market radio show, and for shopping at mother's market, the advice and informational content does not necessarily represent the views of mother's market and kitchen, mother's recommends consulting your health professional for your personal medical condition,