Ten Ways to Ensure Maximum Purity in Supplements

Since 1993, Self Health Resource Center has uncompromisingly pursued the making of the purest, most potent and most bioavailable dietary supplements.

Oskar Thorvaldsson,
Owner and CEO of Dr. Clark Store

At Self Health Resource Center, we actually manufacture the products we sell.  This is key in order to maintain maximum control of the production.  We take pride in manufacturing supplements that don’t have manufacturing processing agents in them.  Our products are manufactured with hypoallergenic raw materials.  You won’t find common additives, flow agents, or binders in our products.

Many other companies try to do what we do, and many others claim to have our level of quality. However, nobody has been able to duplicate what our clients call “Dr. Clark’s Purity.”

Dr. Clark is the undisputed expert in cleansing.  What people don’t realize is that she is also the pioneer of pure supplements as well.

Reason 1: What form?

It is a common misnomer that if you take a certain mg amount of a supplement that it does not matter in what form it is, how it is packaged and with what it’s packaged.  

Take Vitamin C for example. You can get it in many forms and some are more absorbent than others. Even if you see “Ascorbic Acid” on the label of two different products, the ingredients can vary. One manufacturer may use 90% Ascorbic Acid with 10% Corn Starch and Lactose (for better handling in manufacturing).  Of course a manufacturer that focuses on purity will use 100% Pure Ascorbic Acid.  Unfortunately, this is true for lots of ingredients, including:

Reason 2: Tablet Vs. Capsule

The most absorb-able form of a supplement is when it is delivered in powder form or in a capsule.  Capsules dissolve in the stomach, the point that where greatest absorption occurs.  Tablets often do not get dissolved until at some point in the intestinal tract.  This decreases absorption greatly.

Reason 3: Manufacturing Agents

It is common to see tablets shine in bright colors. They do everything to make the tablet easy to swallow as well as look and smell good.  This is good for sales, and it may give you some pleasure when taking the supplement, but again it misses the main reason why you would take a supplement; to get better from whatever ails you.

Think about it; if you are sick and then take a supplement that is packaged with all kinds of chemicals, your body has to break down those chemicals. This takes energy away from your immune system.

Run away when you see: Magnesium Sterate, Corn Starch, Hydroxypro­pyl Methylcell­ulose, Cellulose, Silicon Dioxide!

Reason 4: Flow Agents

Magnesium Stearate, a common flow agent, has increasingly been criticized for hindering absorption.  Some research has been done on this and of course refuted by industry. However, you can use your common sense if you want to buy a supplements with any kind of flow agents.  Take a look at this picture. The yellow part in the middle is the nutritional element; it has jagged edges and obviously will not flow very well.  This is why it has been coated with a flow agent, indicated in blue.  This makes the particle flow fast without caking up in the encapsulation machine.  However, the negative effect is that your nutrient may not be delivered to the most optimum point in the body.  Still, using flow agents is more cost effective so manufacturers will keep on using them in their productions.  Bad for you, good for industry.

Reason 5: Purity from Microbes

Many herbs come from root vegetables.  Roots grow in the ground of course, and what else is in the ground?  Bugs galore!  Lots of them.  One gram of natural soil, about enough to cover a nickel in the palm of your hand, contains up to a billion organisms: bacteria, fungi, protozoa, actinomycetes, viruses, rotifers, microarthropods, nematodes, and many others.

Some people say bugs are good for you.  It is generally accepted that some bugs are good for you but those bugs are not the ones that stick to herbs.  

The FDA has made it illegal to irradiate herbs because even they acknowledge that it can reduce potency.  I can agree on that. But what is a manufacturer to do?  Most of them do nothing to sterilize the herbs they receive.  The farmer and processing plants washed them with water and that’s it.  What they should be doing is to look to nature and be asking the question, “why isn’t everything covered with bugs outside?”  The answer is because of the sun.  The sun lets off Ultra Violet rays.  Those rays are used by better manufacturers in order to kill off microbiological growth.  In addition, freezing the herbs to below 20 degrees Celsius can also help.

Reason 6: Purity from Solvents

It is common for manufacturers to use standard solvents to clean their tanks, table surfaces and equipment.  I once was visiting a supplement manufacturing plant and saw a pallet of “ClorX” sitting on their doc.  They use laundry chlorinating bleach to clean their water tanks! This is about the worst thing you can do.  Laundry bleach contains heavy metals meant to get stains out. It is also tinted blue, which is called “the bluing effect.”  If you have a large sheet of white linen and there is some slight discoloration in it, you can tint it ever so slightly blue, by doing that you will not see the spots.  You won’t see the blue tinting either, your eyes will perceive the entire sheet as white.  This may be good for getting spots out but it’s not good for food.

If you want to use bleach in food preparations, you should use NSF grade bleach, the one without chemicals intended to take spots out of your clothes. In fact Dr. Clark did not want people to use Laundry bleach for any reason whatsoever.

Another solvent commonly used in manufacturing facilities is Propyl Alcohol or Isopropyl Alcohol.  Isopropanol is found in OTC rubbing alcohol (70% Isopropanol).  It is inexpensive and effective to clean with.  In fact, Propyl alcohol is used in many industrial grade and household cleaning supplies.  Manufacturers think nothing of putting it in your lotions also.

If such solvents are used in a supplement manufacturing facility, tiny amounts are bound to find its way into the products.  This may not be measurable using standard laboratory tests but it is never the less almost certain that such contamination occurs even when precautions are taken.  Your supplement, regardless of if it is a liquid, powder, tablet or a capsule may be contaminated with Propyl alcohol.

Dr. Clark found that the best cleaning agent is iodine, ammonia and grain alcohol.  I avoid all types of bleaches. Although inexpensive, I find that even NSF grade bleach may contaminate the products.

Reason 7: Purity from Metals

What’s also in the ground?  Metals!... and lots of them.  Metals can be good for you if they have been absorbed by plants which makes them bio-available.  Here is how it works; there are minerals needed by plants that while actually in the soil, may be in a chemical form available to them; that is, the plants cannot assimilate, or take up these minerals, until they have been changed into a bio-available form by soil organisms.  In other words, the minerals inside the plants are good, and the minerals on the outside of the plants are bad.

Again, some manufacturers don’t do enough to ensure that the supplements they sell are free from the bad kinds of minerals, namely ferrous metals.  Of course the herbs are washed off but invariably tiny amounts of ferrous metals find their way into the plant.  FDA allows manufacturers simply to use a magnet to separate the two, but more is required in order to be diligent. Only a specialized metal detection device can separate do the job.  This should be done at the end stage of manufacturing because, although unlikely, metal shavings can come off the processing equipment and mix with the supplement.

Reason 8: Veggie Caps Vs. Gel Caps

Now that we established that it is better to take capsules than tablets, let’s look into which kind of capsule is purer.  As a manufacturer that insists on purity despite cost, taste and looks, I have come to understand one thing very clearly: The more you process something, the more likely you are to contaminate it.  This holds true for veggie caps.  It is much harder to make a sturdy capsules out of vegetables than to make it out of animal products.

It is counter intuitive; many people erroneously think that everything vegetarian is healthier, but that is not the case.  I respect people that don’t want to eat animals but it is counter productive to paint all vegetable based food as healthy.  A good example: French-fries!  

The same principal applies to the vegetable based capsule.  It came on the market in the 1980’s when gelatin capsules had been on the market for decades.  Only after complicated processing most likely involving various chemical compounds can you make a vegetable capsule.

But aren’t gelatin capsules made with bones that might carry “Mad Cow” prions?  Not all gel caps are made with bones.  A good manufacturer will avoid using such gel caps and only use gel caps made with hide.  Such gel caps are available both Halal and Kosher and certified BSE free.

Reason 9: Safety in Sourcing and Testing

With the mandatory testing set forth by the current Good Manufacturing Practices (cGMP) from the FDA, testing should now become more common in the industry.  However, you would be amazed how some companies cut corners on testing.

All incoming raw materials should be tested for identity and purity.  Do you remember the melamine scandal where Chinese firms added melamine to milk, eggs, pet food and animal feed?  Well they also added melamine to raw materials used for making supplements.  

This is why a good manufacturer tests all incoming raw materials for identity.  In addition, buying only from verified US vendors increases safety.

Testing for purity involves comprehensive microbiology testing whenever appropriate.

Purity and identity tests may involve various laboratory methods depending on what item is being tested.

Testing raw materials is insufficient if no testing is done on “in-process” materials and “finished-goods”.  Equipment and table tops should regularly be tested for microbiology contamination.

Reason 10: Complex Formulations and “Ferry Dust”

If your supplement is to work as advertised, one of the most important factors is the formulation.

We covered how important it is to take pure supplements, but even if the supplement is pure it is essential to take only formulas that are effective.  Unfortunately, this is not simple for the normal consumer to figure out.  Manufacturers have unfortunately been marketing lots of supplements that contain over 10 to 30 ingredients.  They do that so they can display an impressive “Supplement Facts” box.  They are taking advantage of people because as a general rule Dr. Clark and other scientists will tell you that your body will get confused if you take an herbal supplement that contains over 10 herbal ingredients, especially if some of them are incompatible with each other.  Each herb sends a unique signal to the body, and the body will not react to too many signals at one time and will cancel them out or get confused.

Dr Clark believes you should receive the whole herb, not herbal extracts. The more an herb is processed, the greater the likelihood of incorporating pollutants in addition to leaving out wholesome nutrition. That is why we use the whole herb such as wormwood in our herbal supplement products and not extracts are created with the aid of solvents and manufacturing agents.

More notoriously, manufacturers have been known to put “fairy dust” into their formulations. The “fairy dust” is usually some expensive ingredient that is desired by consumers. That expensive ingredient becomes a “fairy dust” if the amount is so small that it has absolutely no effect.

© 2011, Self Health Resource Center (SHRC) and www.DrClarkStore.com