The supplement industry has reached $60 billion dollars in the U.S. and many self-starters are excited to grab a slice of that. Unfortunately, that has created a marketplace of many supplements that don’t contain what they claim. With the additional concerns in the news about contaminated products, it makes choosing our supplements carefully more important than ever.

Keys to choosing quality supplements:

• Supplements should be used in a country with strict regulations for manufacturing.
• Supplements should be tested by an independent lab (third party testing) here in the U.S. but the lab needs to be registered by a reliable service like NSF or ISO.
• Supplement manufacturers who are really proud of their testing results have historically made them available on their websites as Certificates of Analysis (CoAs). Unfortunately, very few manufacturers do this routinely. And some companies who used to do it have had to stop publishing those CoAs because unscrupulous manufacturers are copying them and publishing them as their own (one more reason not to use unreliable supplement companies.)

So which supplement companies can you trust?

A few trusted companies who currently do third party testing, with results available to consumers, include:

• Doublewood
• Naturalis