Supplements

ou stand in Wal-Mart or your favourite health food store, staring at a massive selection of bottles and labels of all different shapes and sizes. How can you possibly make the right choice? You know you want a multi-vitamin/mineral or some vitamin C to help you get though the cold season. But what to buy?

Here are some criteria to use when evaluating nutritional products:

• Is the product provided in its most bio-available form? Take vitamin E. ‘d-alpha tocopherol’ is natural vitamin E. ‘dl-alpha tocopherol’ is a synthetic version of vitamin E and not as potent or as bio-available;

• Has the product been manufactured and formulated to meet pharmaceutical standards for full dissolution and disintegration? Tablets passing through your body fully intact is a colossal waste of money;

• If buying a multi-vitamin/mineral, is it a single daily dose? If so, keep on looking. There won’t be enough ingredients or dosage to give you the potency you need;

• Does the product contain the potency to give you the desired results? If it provides dosages at RDA levels, it will not be adequate. Do your homework and find out what optimal nutritional levels are for the nutrients you need;

• Does the company manufacture its products to pharmaceutical guidelines for Good Manufacturing Practices (GMPs)? Products manufactured to food grade standards will not meet the quality levels you need and deserve;

• Is the product actually manufactured in-house? Many of the brands you see on the shelves today are manufactured by out-sourced facilities who are selected based on price, not quality;

If you want to ensure you get a product that will actually do what you want it to do and deliver value, you need to do your homework. Using the above criteria, you will quickly narrow your search and find a supplement that will do the job — and to avoid the ones that plain just won’t work.