A Chevrolet is a car. A BMW is also a car. Both cars but the BMW is considered a much higher quality product.

Too many people fail to realise this difference also exists in the nutritional supplement world. To many, including most people in the medical community, a multi-vitamin is a multi-vitamin — they are all the same.

Not so.

There is a huge difference in quality levels in the highly unregulated supplement industry. Caveat emptor — let the buyer beware — is never more true than in the supplement world.

To highlight this, let’s take one aspect of supplements: dissolution. In order for the nutrients from a supplement to be bio-available to the body, the tablet must breakdown in the digestive tract. Common sense.

Supplements manufactured to the United States Pharmacopeia (USP) standard are assured of dissolution and other quality attributes. The USP standard is one of the benchmarks to look for in evaluating your supplements of choice.

Case in point: a number of years ago I attended a seminar put on by a physician who lectured on the power of using nutritional supplements in his family practice. He told a story about one particular seminar where he spoke about the number of different nutritional products that don’t break down during digestion and are eliminated from the body, often intact. No break down, no bio-availability, wasted money.

At the intermission, a fellow approached him and said, “I know exactly what you are talking about — and I can vouch for you. I am in the portable toilet business — constructions sites, mostly. When we clean out the holding tanks we find all kinds of nutritional supplement tablets trapped in the screens we use to filter the waste.”

The physician, quite pleased to have his ‘allegations’ confirmed, said, “Too bad you don’t know which brand names they were.” To which the fellow replied, “I can tell you the brand names. I could still read the brand names stamped on most of the tablets!”

Dissolution is but one of many attributes that need to be scrutinised when analysing your nutritional products of choice. This story really highlights the need to do your homework before trusting the brand of your nutritional products.

After all, if you aren’t careful, you just might be flushing your money down the toilet.