Getting More (And Less) Than You Paid For

I received an instant message from a friend this morning about an article on the MSNBC website.

A vitamin a day may do more harm than good

Of 21 brands of multivitamins on the market in the United States and Canada selected by ConsumerLab.com and tested by independent laboratories, just 10 met the stated claims on their labels or satisfied other quality standards.

…

Other products contained more or less of a particular vitamin than listed on the label. And some did not dissolve in the correct amount of time, meaning they could potentially pass through the body without being fully absorbed.

So basically, if you take a daily supplement, you probably aren't getting what you think you are, since it's either (a) not in there, or (b) passes through your body before it's absorbed.

More troubling however was the fact that one of them contained more than 10 times the amount permitted without warning in California.

Most worrisome, according to ConsumerLab.com president Dr. Tod Cooperman, is that one product, The Vitamin Shoppe Multivitamins Especially for Women, was contaminated with lead.

"I was definitely shocked by the amount of lead in [this] woman's product," he said. "We've never seen that much lead in a multivitamin before."

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In the report, tests showed that The Vitamin Shoppe women's product contained 15.3 micrograms of lead per daily serving of two tablets.

This amount of lead is more than 10 times the amount permitted without a warning in California, the only state that regulates lead in supplements, Cooperman said.

The more popular labels, such as Centrum, Member's Mark, One A Day, and Flintstones, all contained the proper amounts and had no problems.

I wonder how The Vitamin Shoppe is going to explain this?

Also blogging this story:

The Consumerist