A few words on vitamins

So most people don’t know it but I am a bit of a vitamin junky. I take 10 a day! Recently I was doing some research and was shocked at what I found. First off did you know that the FDA is not involved in approving vitamins? I didn’t! I kind of thought a vitamin was a vitamin and the brand didn’t really mater. Wrong again!
Recently both Consumer Reports and Consumer Lab did testing on the quality of tons of brands of multivitamins, what they found surprised me and changed the way I will buy vitamins from now on. They found many brands contained much higher levels of lead than labeled and some had lead leaves that could possibility be dangerous. For example The Vitamin Shoppe women's product contained 15.3 micrograms of lead per daily serving; this amount of lead is more than 10 times the amount permitted without a warning in California. They also found many companies lied or misrepresented the amounts of each vitamin. Example, The Vitamin Shoppe’s product I talked about before contained just 54 percent of the 200 milligrams of calcium stated on the label.
So what do you look for? Vitamin makers do have 3 independent companies they can go through to get some kind of approval. Look for these seals on your vitamin bottles, USP (United States Pharmacopeia), CL (Consumer Labs), and NSF (National Formulary). If your vitamin doesn’t have one of those seals it means they either did not pass the testing or they didn’t want to submit to the testing. Either way I will try to never again buy a vitamin without one of those seals.
The top three brands for adults from both Consumer Reports and Consumer Lab were Centrum, Nature Made and Kirkland (Costco) brands. For kids, stay with either Centrum Children’s One-A-Day or Flintstones brands. Flintstones is what my mom always bought when I was growing up, thought that was funny. She was always ahead of the times. :) Costco happened to carry all of the recommended brands (Go Costco!!!) and that’s where I always shop for my vitamins because it saves money to buy them in bulk.
Do you know the best source of calcium? Not those expensive calcium chews or fancy pills. It is Tums! Yep, the cheap stuff most of us have in the medicine cabinet right now.
Well I hope I didn’t scare you too much. But hopefully you will look twice before buying your next batch of vitamins, I know I will!

My vitamin containers. The the blue is for morning and the pink one is for before bed .