What You Should Know Before Buying A Fitness Supplement?

The vitamin and supplement industry has been around us for a long time .It is also not going away. Because the supplement industry is here to stay, you need to vigilant and knowledgeable enough to sort out the good supplement from the bad. Ironically, your health depends on it. Your savings account is also at stake. 

Consumer Reports recently offered a heads-up on the downside of vitamins and supplements. It’s pretty solid stuff. Not only an eye-opener, but it’s a wake-up call for all the magic potion-seekers out there hoping for miracles. With information obtained from interviews with experts, published research, and the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) collection of consumer complaints, they offered these warning. 

1) Warning label Issues

The FDA doesn’t require any warning labels on supplements except for those that contain iron. For those that do offer warnings, the labels can be inconsistent. Some of them only offer general warnings for product use if pregnant or nursing, or about possible unnamed drug interactions. Less than 50% of the supplements warned against their use if a medical condition was present or if possible adverse reactions could occur.

 

Because of the lack of consistency in warning labels, make sure your physician or pharmacist knows what supplements and prescription drugs you are taking or thinking of taking. 

2) Vitamin and Mineral Overdosing

Large doses of the fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E, and K can create issues, and even normal doses may interfere with certain prescription medications. Adverse can effects also occur with too much calcium or iron in supplements. 

 

My advice is to check supplement and food labels, and then add up your total exposure to everything you daily consume. If your physician gives you suggestion you need more of a specific nutrient that cannot be obtained from your diet then opt for a single-ingredient dose. 

3. Supplements are Risky & Might Actually Be Medications

In Between 2007 and mid-April of 2012, the FDA received more than six thousand reports of serious issues associated with dietary supplements, vitamins, and herbs. Nearly ten thousand issues, some multiple, were reported. Here is a partial list: 

 

Existing laws make it very difficult for the FDA to ban anything once distributors slap that microscopic disclaimer on any products. To date, the FDA has banned only the ingredient ephedrine alkaloids. Even though it took decades to do this, ephedra-based weight-loss products were implicated in thousands of issues, including deaths. 

4. Supplements Cannot Cure Diseases

As I previously mentioned, provided a supplement manufacturer places a disclaimer on their product stating it cannot diagnose, cure, mitigate, treat, or prevent a disease, they are free and clear (the microscopic disclaimers emblazoned on products usually require reading glasses or a magnifying glass to read it). Up to now, no supplement has been proven to cure any major disease in human body.

 

Many people believe anything provided it looks legitimate. That is why all supplement manufacturers take the big risk of hyping their products by either pushing the line or even crossing it illegally, hoping they will go unnoticed many time.