A vitamin a day may do more harm than good ConsumerLab.com report finds unexpected nutrient levels, contamination

By Jacqueline Stenson – Contributing editor, MSNBC

If you’re banking on a daily vitamin to make up for any deficiencies in your diet, you may be getting a whole lot more – or less – than you bargained for.

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.
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.”

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.

“Half the products were fine, half were not,” said Cooperman.
ConsumerLab.com is a Westchester, N.Y.-based company that independently evaluates hundreds of health and nutrition products and periodically publishes reviews. In the new report, released to MSNBC.com, the company purchased a selection of the popular multivitamins on the market as well as some smaller brands and sent them, without labels, to two independent laboratories to be tested.

WHAT CAN YOU DO ABOUT THIS, AS A CONSUMER?

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• Microbiology Contamination – Bacteria Yeast & Mold
• Peroxides & Anisidines – Markers of Rancidity
• Potency – Assay by HPLC, GC
• High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC)
• Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR)
• Ultraviolet/Visible Spectrophotometer
• Inductively Coupled Plasma Spectrometry (ICP)

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