LEVEL 5 - SUPPLEMENTATION (Part 1) Inspecting Quality

Question 1

What factors must be analyzed before considering any nutritional supplement?

Answer 1

Quality, Validity, and effectiveness.

Question 2

What are some ways to check quality of product?

Answer 2

One of the ways to check the quality is to make sure the product has been run through a lab analysis.

Sometimes on the product label and most often on the company’s website, will include some type of report showing that a third party lab analysis found the contents of the bottle to be in line with the claims made by the product creator. Basically, some other lab verifies that what the supplement company claims is in their product, is actually in it, and nothing else.

Supplement companies that send lab reports to their customers with their orders. This is a mark of a quality company.

Another quality check would be a third party certification.These certifying stamps indicate that there is a third-party company without any biased interest in that supplement’s success that has come into the facility and approved the operations and practices that are involved in that product’s creation. So supplements that have USP, NSF, or GMP certifications are generally more likely to have some basic level of quality and to meet the claims listed on their labels.

The use of reliable suppliers can help ensure the quality of a product. For example, CreaPure is a company that produces, and has a stake interest in being a high-grade supplier of creatine monohydrate. Other supplement companies will often license the use of CreaPure in the supplements they sell because of the ensured quality.

Question 3

What are some third party qualification groups?

Answer 3

The U.S. Pharmacopeial Convention (USP), NSF International (NSF), or Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP)

Question 4

What is an “ingredient” to look out for in a product and why ?

Answer 4

I would also recommend not getting products with proprietary blends. A proprietary blend is where a company trademarks a combination of substances that they mix together and then gives that mixture a name of their choosing. They are required to list the ingredients, but not the dosages. For example, a label might say it includes 30 grams of a “muscle blend” and lists all the ingredients, but doesn’t tell you the individual amount of each ingredient.

This is basically a way to say “look, this is our special sauce, we don’t want people to reproduce it, and so we’re not going to tell you exactly what’s in it.”

Question 5

What are some red flags to look for when choosing a whey powder?

Answer 5

The rise of the phenomenon known as ‘protein spiking’. Some labs test for the total amino acid content rather than the amounts of the individual amino acids themselves. This means that protein companies can dump cheap amino acids into the mix (mainly glycine and taurine), skimping on the actual whey content, which is expensive, and yet still pass some quality tests.

Here are some red flags to look out for when choosing a whey powder:

1. The cost per pound / kilo of claimed protein content is considerably cheaper than average. Whey is a commodity traded on the open market. You can be ripped o and pay way too much (Andy has seen 11x market price protein from one “luxury brand” gym in Japan), but you won’t ever find it significantly cheaper than everything else without there being something dodgy going on.
2. It has a proprietary blend (or doesn’t list leucine content).
3. Leucine content, when listed, is lower than 2.7 g per 25 g of protein content (the BCAA content of whey is 25%, leucine should be 11%).

Question 6

What are some great websites to find out about supplements?

Answer 6

Examine.com, jissn.biomedcentral.com, researchgate.com