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, there are thousands of supplements out there and it's tough to make sense of the claims made by some of these products, today will help you sort through these claims, so you know what to look for. But first up, Dan lifting is the CEO of Quality of Life Labs and a director of educational outreach for the HCC Research Association. Over the past five years, he has a coordinated clinical research studies and let a variety of educational initiatives to introduce a HCC to clinicians worldwide.

Dan is an authority on evidence-based dietary supplements and has been a leading advocate for the adoption of clinically supported natural compounds by the mainstream medical community, and we welcome him to the mother's market radio show down. How are you?

Great, thank you for having me on the show, Kim, thank you for being here.

Why don't you fill our audience a little bit on your mission and your work before we get to the show's topic today.

Absolutely, our mission is to bring health to the consumers, we believe that the way to do that is through education. If consumers can understand what products in this very crowded and challenging marketplace are best for them, they will be able to make highly educated decisions that truly benefit them, and we're fortunate to be in... In the industry where there are a lot of companies that have a similar mission, but with any other industry, you have Ronalds, so we believe that by educating consumers, we can make sure that the products and the practices they bring into their life are truly best for them, excellent. Today we're talking about the helping consumers make sense of scientific claims on nutritional supplement products, so let me ask, we'll start by asking you why is there so much confusion among consumers in understanding the level of scientific support behind nutritional supplements?

The answer is that it is an area that is difficult to understand consumers on products that are effective, but to understand and different Chad between the products in the market place requires some technical understanding that most consumers don't have, so what we actually spend a lot of our time doing both, working with consumers as well as retailers such as Mother's market is UN-helping consumers understand the science and the labels behind the products.

The reason why you have this level of confusion is that if you look at the brands out there, everybody's evidence-backed, scientifically, validated, researched, etcetera, but the question is, what does the language really mean?

Well, there are three ways to really research whether an ingredient works, you can perform test tube Studies, also known as in vitro studies, which are good to understand the basics of science, but are very unreliable in terms of ultimately determining whether the product works in humans. Then you have your animal studies, which ethical issues aside, again, provide evidence of safety, so they're very good for safety testing, but they actually shed very little light on whether it works on humans, because 90% of products, whether they're pharmaceutical or natural, that work in animals actually don't translating to humans, they say, Well, we've managed to cancer cure cancer and rats, but unfortunately, obviously, we're far away from the Golan humans, and then the real goal standard and really the only way to reliably determine whether or not an ingredient or product is effective is to actually test them in human studies, so what consumers need to look for is ingredients and products that have been validated in human clinical studies, clinical means human, it can be clinical is not an animal study in vitro study.

So it's really important to ask that question and often to even take a step forward and say, Show me the studies, I wanna see the human studies, how large were they published in prestigious journals that are listed in MEDLINE, which is the National Institute of Health reference base, and we encourage our consumers to ask those questions and to do that research because it would help them separate the flow from the real thing.

Excellent. Is this level of confusion inevitable or mental or supplement companies do more to create greater clarity?

I certainly think there is an opportunity for that type of education, one of the whole back is that a lot of the brands will carry both ingredients and supplements that do have human studies and some that do not, that are only back by, let's say, animal studies, and there's some ingredients that have become very popular in spite of the lack of human studies, the best example has been the raspberry ketones, as everybody knows, Dr. Ross talked about it the next thing, He shows up everywhere including Walmart, but that was only studied in rats and it did show promising benefits, but again, no human studies, so there is some motivation to not necessarily convey that match the consumers, but we believe that as an industry as a whole, and particularly the high quality supplement brands, should educate their consumers, even if they don't have human studies and everything, so that at least they can promote those products, and as our industries growing out, we are seeing more and more human research on ingredients and actually, our parent company may pro that supplies ingredients to a lot of brands in the industry, has focused on bringing those types of products to the market, so we certainly call in other brands, and as a part of our mission, we try to explain to consumers, one, They need human studies, and they need to really understand the basics of the science instead of relying on some guy in the radio who promises the world but may not actually have the backing to validate it. And that's so important. I wanted to talk about what quality of life... Quality of life takes a very methodical approach to explaining the level of efficiency of your products and... Can you elaborate on that?

Sure, so we decided to build our entire brand around the idea of clinical proof, meaning proven humans and transparency, so that we can educate and really not just make the claim, but actually encourage the consumer to go out and research that ourselves, so we have a promise or guarantee to the consumers that every single ingredient in every single quality of life product is backed by human clinical studies and is actually delivered in the same dosage as it was tested in the Human Studies, which is a bit of a separate issue that... Hopefully, I'll talk about later, but this is a guarantee that we're absolutely religious about, and what we do is we actually encourage our consumers to go and research that ourselves.

So on our website, if you go to Quality of Life, dot NET proof, and you can also access it through the home page, you can go on a page and click on any one of our products. You'll see the subpoenas box pop up, you can then click on any ingredient of choice and you will be taken to a third party research site, which is human clinicals dot org that we have set up, and you will be able to see a summary of every study on every ingredient there, how many patients are on... Will participate in the study, what they studied, what they found, and we use consumer-friendly lame and language to explain it, so like we say, don't take our for it, come and basically check out the proof, and again, we haven't seen other folks do it, we set up human clinicals dot org, so that other brands actually can do that and can promote their products that way. And so we drive home the message and then we ask people to basically research ourselves, and we've had phenomenal feedback from consumers, from retailers for store, on her store managers, doctors. So we're very excited about that initiative.

I am interested in finding out too with that human clinical, what their requirements are, and I know you're talking about that right now, but are these people that are interested becoming a clinical study, what are their requirements that do the... Are these people that have cancer or these people who are these humans that are interested... Sure, so when you go, for example, on the sum reason human clinicals website, we actually show who the subject of the study were, so whether they were healthy, healthy, maybe elderly cancer patients, etcetera, because... Can you're asking the right question? You need to look at the population type before really being able to determine what the product is right for you, so if somebody got for bid has IBS, but the study was done in healthy individuals. Will that help them? We don't know. And basically, same thing by Vera, what we try to do with ingredients we use is use products have been tested both in human, in healthy adults as well as people with specific conditions, so that way we can talk about potentially prevention in of Structure Function, specific language or being able to basically target those groups, the reason why we set this up as a third party site and why we think it's so important is that obviously we have regulatory constraints in our industry that prevent us from be able to talk about that, but as long as these are third-party commercial materials on ingredients, herbs rather than finished products, we're able to educate people, and we have this whole double click rule where you go from our website to the third party site, and again, we create as a public service, so it's a way for us to really educate consumers about the science, and that we believe more than anything else can really drive demand for our industry, because ultimately people will continue buying products if they work, and if you select products that have been shown to be effective in human studies, they are much more likely to work. That products that have been tested.

So let's educate consumers, let's get them to take the products that actually been shown to work, they will come back and buy more, they will be healthier, our economy will grow, and it's truly a win-win.

Right. Okay, next question I have is, one of the areas of confusion for consumers is related to doses and what are some of the pointers that you can provide to consumers in this regard to dosage?

Great question, as I referenced earlier, and it's something that we spend a lot of time on as well, if you're a consumer and you pick up a bottle and you see turmeric curcumin, so you see 4 milligrams and there's a mass market now sort of a Fortune 500 brand that I saw this in the multi-vitamin, so they say four milligrams and feel Giulio, I've heard of Kerman turmeric sounds good for milligrams. What do you know?

Well, all of the studies on curcumin have been done on anywhere between 500 milligrams and even two grams, there's nothing even close to four milligrams, so this is what we call fair dusting, you're basically springing something into the formula, so you can tell consumers you have it, you're getting no benefits, it's eating half a blue Barrio day and expecting some kind of a result.

So the way that clinical studies work is that you show that an ingredient or a finished product is effective at a certain dose, just because you've shown that something is effective at a Graham, does not indicate whether it effective at 500 milligrams or 200 milligrams or 50 milligrams that's common sense. The problem is that consumers have a really difficult time discerning because... How do you do the research?

So again, what we try to do is we keep it simple. So on our website, we actually have a box called the dosage table, or we say, Here's the dosage that was used in the clinical studies, and here's the dosage that's used in our product.

Likewise, when you go to the human clinicals dot-org, we specify, it's very easy to see, Here's a dosage that was used in the studies, and we make that guarantee we will not use an ingredient in a dosage that's below with the level list in the studies. It's a religious guarantee, like I said, we haven't seen other people do it because again, it's sometimes challenging, but we believe is if you don't have the proof, don't use it, and if you don't have the dosage that's in line with the studies, you're putting a product in that you don't know. Really, it works.

So we think it's really important and we encourage consumers to pay attention to this area and the label as well.

That's great, and that's again, almost a guarantee there so far, it's worked so far on the supplements facts, you often find herbs that have standardized to a certain act of fraction, what should consumers look for in this regard?

Now we're getting in a ternary that's even more challenging and technical for consumers to understand because you have, let's say, a nerve like IATA, well, you have different species of Echinacea, you have roots versus you have leaves versus aerial parts.

Furthermore, when you extract and Herb, you're able to standardize a certain active ingredients, So you extracted in a certain way where you test it and you say, Okay, this active fraction, 'cause obviously these are complex, full-spectrum herbs that have a lot of different active ingredients, but if you believe that a certain active ingredient and there's research that shows that it's effective, you need to make sure that you're delivering enough of that ingredient, and guess what? Again, you have to go to the human clinical studies and make sure that the study that was done used the same species of the herb, same part to aerial parts or leaves, and that it's been standardized, the same level of active ingredient.

So again, when we summarize the studies and we're dealing with complex Serbs, we specify that and then we make sure that the ingredient there we use in a quality of life product matches that. Exactly.

So again, it's difficult for the consumer to be able to do that research and every ingredient, so we do explain to the consumers, we make this promise when you grab a quality of life product off the shelf, you be confident of that, but we believe that claims are great, but you need to empower consumers to go and do that research, so again, we encourage people to visit, do their homework, 'cause we know they'll emerge and they'll say, Wow, what I'm getting in the bottle is exactly what's been... What's been shown in the study as opposed to saying, Oh, I heard at Cannes is good for you, let me go and pick up a bottle of that a Walmart.

Chances are, you're not gonna get the same thing, 'cause obviously a lot of price pressure there, and people try to use the cheapest Star rather than the one that's been study in humans.

Right, but again, the dosage, you've already done that, but then you've also empower the consumer to do their bit of homework as well.

Absolutely.

Well, this is very interesting information, and right now you have to take a quick break, but more with Dan in just a moment. Don't go away, we'll be right back.

And welcome back to the mother's market radio show.

And we wanna remind you that if you missed any portion of today's show, you can find us on iTunes by searching mother's market or download the show from our website, mother's market dot com, click the link for radio and listen to past shows, plus download our Healthy Recipes and money savings coupons, all available at mother's market dot com. And now, back to our interview with quality of life labs, CEO Dan lifting, we're talking about helping consumers make sense of scientific claims on nutritional supplement products, and so really interesting down how is... Well, many products claim to have superior bioavailability or absorption, and how can consumers check the validity of this in basically the same way that consumers can check the validity of product efficacy in general, based on the human studies, what we see in this superior by availability movement is that people will often use, again, in vitro or test tube studies to try to show that they are greening is more effective than what else is in the market place, so what that generally involved is they basically take a test tube, they try to replicate the pH of the stomach, and they show that the ingredient is better, observant test too, and they say, Well, if it's better or in a test tube, that must work in a human... Unfortunately, just because something works in a test tube doesn't necessarily mean it will work in the human body, which is infinitely complex, furthermore, in case of main ingredients, you're trying to actually increase the level of that active ingredient in the blood to reduce inflammation or create some other benefits, so Coke curcumin a variety of other things.

So you may actually be absorbing it in your intestinal lining, but it may not actually be being absorbed in the blood, which means that it really produce no benefits in order to validate that a product is truly superior in terms of its absorption. You have to produce data in humans, so for example, we have a line of so-called Sr, vitamin sustain Elysium in Skokie, tennis, curcumin survives. We'll be launching PQ SR.So what we do is basically have a group with people come in and they take the regular Coke 10 and we test the levels of Coke tan in the blood, we then send them home for a week for so-called washout period, 'cause they need to get all the Coitus of the blood, so that they're fresh, then they come back and we give them the sustain release version, the coconuts, and we look at their levels of quoining the blood, and we test that actually everyone hours, two, 36, 12, 24 hours, and then we see... And we compare the levels, what happened last week with the regular and what happens with the COC tennis are... And then when we show these two graphs, we're able to show the enhancement that we get in the human serum, and then it becomes meaningful.

So in Coke, for example, we were able to show that it's 25 sustained lease, which means that you take it once a day instead of having to take a name in the PM, which was how a lot the other studies took place with other ingredients that again, consumers don't get it. They say, I'll pop it once a day, that's it. Secondly, what centers thing is we've been able to show that we triple by availability and 100% of the people... One of the things people don't realize that you often have a bell curve, so you get some people that get a great improvement, but some people that don't, and none of us know whether or not we're good absorbers about... Absorbers of Coke 10. so if you can provide the sustain release, if you can provide improve by availability, and if you can create this universal enhancement, then you really struck a home run and you have to demonstrate any human studies.

So again, we try to educate consumers so they can understand that, 'cause if they see a pretty graph and they don't look into it, well, was distaste in humans or was it just done as an isolation study, then they may be gravely misled.

Wow, that's fascinating. And there you go, and that's your study right there, that's... And I like your analogy to the test tube, Quality of Life, several products with enhanced availability claims, what research do you rely on to support these claims then?

So again, human, human, human, so what we do is we do start with the dissolution study to optimize the formula, then we'll do a two-person human clinical again, just to validate, Hey, this works, and then we'll move on and we do a larger clinical, so usually 10 patients, you don't need huge studies to be able to demonstrate the bioavailability enhancement because you're actually using people as their own control, so what we mean is we have the same individual coming in and week one testing out the regular Coke 10 as then that same person comes back basically a week later, so you can see how that person has done, you don't have the kind of InterVarsity that you get, you have two groups that's completely separate, so we don't rely on that for the efficacy, we obviously know that there's so much data out there on that, because you're Co-Q10, nobody's questioning that. We're just demonstrating that you're improving absorption, so in case of that, you go, It's 100 milligrams a day, but you're getting an equivalent of 300 milligrams, and the most important thing, again, is your effectively guaranteed that absorption because we've shown efficacy in basically universally.

So we have a 20-person study where every single person triple their cookie, ten levels or more, and it's actually interesting, so a lot of times you see on the labels improved by availability by up to 10 times up to is that's a warning flag because you could have a study with 100 people. You've got one person that's got a C and now you can say, Hey, it's up to that, you need to make sure that you're increasing in everybody because you could be a poor absorber and you wanna be covered, it's like insurance, very... That's a keyword there, and that is your red flag on topic of superior absorption, what about products claims that krill oil is a superior than fish oil in delivering PAH and are those credible?Krill is really fantastic example, so there's definitely data to show that if EP and DHA are bound with phospholipids, which is the case with cellini with fish, they're better absorbed, so that data makes it very compelling to take cripple mens... We are big believers in krill, there are actually a number of human studies that have been shown the Benito Creole, particularly in regard to join Health and hard health in reducing some of the symptoms associated with PMs. So we have both a men's Nicola formula and a women's neuro formula.

However, what we've done is we've actually taken it a step further and we said, there's all this day don't krull, there's also great data on fish oil, why don't... We actually combine those two. So we launch the product called krill oil MD, where we combine krill with high concentration fish oil, so we get the enhanced by availability to benefit of Crow. We can fall back on a lot of the research that's been done on fish that hasn't yet been done, and Crow, we also get to a combined level of EPA DHA 500 milligrams a day, which is recommended by the American Dietetic Association, and has been shown effective in a lot of human clinicals, and then we actually take a step further because one of the nutrients naturally, President cilla asked Stanton and sesame is a fantastic nutrient that's been used as a stand-alone recently, and there are some very nice human studies on that, but the level that's natural, present Quill is fairly low, so we actually add as a Santana to the formula at a level where we get the human clinical data validation, and now instead of buying a crow and a fish and an SSM and separately, you can get all three of them in a single formula, and that's been moving really, really well for us, and we're very excited about that product, is that the year flagship product is we have sort of the first generation flagship and still remains to be as our HCC, the medicinal mushroom-based Time Modulator, which I mean is just a miraculous product that I love to talk about, and we were actually... For the first five years of our existence, that's really what we focused on, and then as we launched the full line, we now have about 30 products, we've really focused on taking an ingredient that has a lot of data like krill, for example, and take it to the next level, delivering super absorption, combining this synergistic way without the ingredients, and so from that perspective, in that new generation kill LMD has certainly been a flagship for us.

Can we talk a little bit about your HCC now, word? We've mentioned that you're a flagship product, what is this... Yeah, absolutely. So again, mushrooms a wonderful... There are a lot of much products out there, but the question you have to ask is human studies... There are 20 human clinical studies on HCC, we actually have a website called a HTC research dot-org that has summaries of all those, and human clinical deter has that too, and it's really just an amazing compound that has been shown to be effective both and healthy adults as well as individuals with a variety of health challenges, it's used, very Wieland oncology, over 1000 clinics in Japan use it. And the WAC works is that when you take it, the body basically recognize that, is it as a harmless external agent, so it basically regulates your immune system, but it doesn't stimulate it, so it doesn't do what a lot of the pharmaceutical drugs out there basically do.

So if you have an immune system that's not functioning at its peak levels, you're basically able to operate it and have a function optimally, but if you're perfectly healthy, it doesn't over-stimulate the mu system, which is really critical, because if you ever stimulate immunity, you get inflammation, in fact, we have some data and HC regulating the immune system, so it really is this balancing compound that is so essentially to take... We always talk about... We describe it as the multi-vitamin for your immune system, we know that we should all be taking multi-ES and the immune system is so critical to your overall health that we believe that ACC is a supplement that everybody should be taking to maintain their daily immunity because if you look at a number of chronic conditions, even cancer cancer is the result of a male-functioning immune system, our bodies are constantly producing cancer cells, and the natural killer cells, dendritic cells, and these other immune cells are basically sapping them, they're destroying them as soon as they're created, and that's what keeps us healthy as people age and as their immune systems deteriorate, these cells tend to proliferate, which is why... We know so many young people have been affected by cancer. We don't think about it as an age-related disease while it is incident rises dramatically as we get older, so actually, if men live long enough, every man will eventually get prostate cancer, that's what the urologist say, so you need to maintain a healthy immune system to stave off these conditions, and we'll believe CIS, a critical component of a regimen that everybody should be on, and one last question, you're making someone... He tried another complex category with a lot of comparative claims are probiotics and what should consumers look for, I think when evaluating a probiotic product... Great question. Avoid the billions, gazillion trillions war. Meaning, all the brands out there, not at all, but many of them are saying, Well, we're delivering 100 billion, 200 billion. That's what's good for you. It doesn't matter how many building you put in, you need to look at two things, will these bacteria survive? Which means that when you look at the label, see if they can make a guarantee on the claim on the number of billions of Chas, a probiotic ad date of expiration, not a date of manufacturing, it doesn't matter whether these bugs are alive when they're produced, what matters when they're alive, when you're taking them, when they're in new medicine cabinet or the kitchen, number two is look at the human studies, if the study was done at 5 billion, it's perfectly fine to take a 5 billion product.

So look at the human studies, they make sure that the guaranteed potency in terms of live bacteria is a date of expiration, and that's critical.

So with our probiotics, we use a single strain from the largest dairy company in Japan called Moraga milk, and provider uses a clinically bag dosage and we guarantee life potency at the time of expiration, which is key.

Excellent, well, thank you so much for your time down in some great advice, and we really appreciate your knowledge and we look forward to having you on again, but in the meantime, get more information on Dan and his website, Quality of Life dot net. We look forward to our next visit, thank you and 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,