How can I ensure the quality of my vitamins or supplements?

To ensure the quality of your vitamins or supplements, there is a home test you can try, you can look for third party seals on the label and you can avoid proprietary blends. Watch consumer healthcare expert Tod Cooperman, MD, explain these factors.

Transcript

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Just watch out for products that claim to have proprietary blends, proprietary formulas, where they're not really telling you what's in the, uh, product.

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There are a number of things you can do to try to assure the quality of your vitamin or supplement. One, there's a test you can do at home on any tablet

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or caplet, which approximates what we do in the laboratory in terms of making sure that it'll break apart and release its ingredients.

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You can take the pill, put it in a glass of warm water about body temperature, 98, 99 degrees.

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Stir it for 30 minutes. And try to keep that water warm. You could maybe put it on or off a hot plate. At the end of the 30 minutes, if the pill hasn't completely

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broken apart, whether there might be just-- just stuff on the bottom, or it's all gone into solution, if that hasn't happened, there may

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be a problem with that product. This won't work, however, with chewables, which you're going to break up in your mouth,

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extended-release, or sustained-release, or time-release products, or enteric coated products, which are actually supposed to stay intact for a while.

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Other important things that you can do to ensure quality of a vitamin, first, you can check our list on consumer [INAUDIBLE] testing these products.

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Or you can look for our seal or any other third-party seal, such as USP. These are groups that test the products for their ingredients,

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contaminants, make sure these pills break apart. So that's another thing you can do. And then third, just watch out for products

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that claim to have proprietary blends, proprietary formulas, where they're not really telling you what's in the product.

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If you really want a specific ingredient, you should be looking for that ingredient. And you should look for the right amount of that ingredient on the supplement facts panel

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on the back of the bottle. [HEARTBEAT] [BEEPING]