Dear Friends,
One of my goals with these letters and other informational content is to give you guidance on how to find and choose high quality supplements – even if it’s not from NatureCity.
We’re not the only good supplement brand, there’s actually a good number of them, but your challenge is there are many more bad brands out there selling poor quality or outright fraudulent products that I would never take - and I don’t want you too either.
My first piece of advice is to seek out supplements made with branded ingredients, not generic ingredients.
Branded ingredients matter for getting the results you want, for safety reasons, and they also help protect you from fraud – all of which we’ll review in this letter.
What is a Branded Ingredient?
In the supplement world, a branded ingredient is an ingredient that is trademarked and sold under a specific brand name versus a generic raw material.
Many of these ingredients are also patented – and have unique features or benefits that make them superior to generics, such as offering consistent premium quality.
You can usually see these brands visibly displayed on supplement product labels and typically on product websites too.
At NatureCity, we use close to 200 branded ingredients, and the names are identified in the Supplement Facts panel and the brand logos also appear elsewhere on the label.
Just having a trademark and brand name isn’t enough to make it a good ingredient or something NatureCity will use. A lot more goes into it, starting with having good quality research support.
Has it Been Shown to Work in Humans?
Quality branded ingredients have been the subject of multiple human clinical studies that validate an ingredient’s health effects, the dosage needed to achieve benefits, and help identify any potential side-effects or safety cautions from taking the ingredient.
You don’t get this with generic ingredients which are rarely backed by research. Claims marketers of generics make are often based on science they “borrow” from branded ingredients or unrelated materials.
What’s more, although generics may look and sound the same, they’re usually not – and quality can vary, unlike branded ingredients which typically offer consistent quality from batch to batch.
By quality, we mean 1) consistent potency of key nutritional compounds and 2) consistent purity control – which protects you from undesirable levels of heavy metals, microbes, and other contaminants.
The makers of branded ingredients do this for themselves as well as you. They’re motivated to protect the brand they invested heavily in to get to market.
As you may know, clinical studies with humans are very expensive – typically running well into hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Because of the high cost, the companies investing in these studies generally use the highest quality ingredients to give them the best chance of good results – and then they protect that investment to ensure you’re getting the same quality, bottle after bottle.
This benefits you as the user of the branded ingredient, and you usually don’t have this same level of quality assurance with generic ingredients where the makers are essentially anonymous (and don’t have a consumer brand to protect).
Extra Fraud Protection
Let’s face it, many supplements being sold, especially online, don’t contain the amount of the ingredients listed on the label – forget quality for a moment, they don’t even have the dosage they claim.
If a supplement is fraudulent, counterfeit, or subpar in some way, it can affect not only the reputation of the supplement brand, but the branded ingredient partners, whose name and logo are also on the label.
As a result, branded ingredient suppliers are vigilant about making sure their ingredient is really in the product in the amount stated on the label.
In fact, sometimes a branded ingredient owner will buy products that have their ingredient listed and test it independently to make certain the ingredient is both present in the product and it’s the right amount.
Something else brand owners do to make sure there’s no funny stuff going on is confirm with us that our manufacturer is buying the correct amount of the ingredient raw material needed to make the number of bottles we ordered.
So the branded ingredient company will contact me and say… “your manufacturer Vitaquest just placed an order with us, how many bottles are you making”?
And I’ll say 5,000 bottles, how much raw material did they order? And we’ll go through the math and see if it makes sense. If they only bought enough material to make 1,000 bottles instead of 5,000 bottles, that’s a red flag.
We’ve never had this happen with Vitaquest, but some less scrupulous manufacturers will use some of the branded material but fill the rest of the capsule with a cheap generic material (or filler).
This is another way fraud happens in the industry, and like us, the branded ingredient owners want to protect against this happening.
So without you or other consumers knowing it, there’s this cross-checking being done behind the scenes with the suppliers of branded ingredients that helps protect you from being ripped off by bad actors committing fraud.
Quality and Your Health is Worth It
Now you might be thinking “what’s the downside of branded ingredients? We have all these pros, there has to be a negative”.
The branded ingredients do cost more than generic ingredients. However, for all the reasons discussed today, consumer surveys indicate that the majority of supplement users are willing to pay for this quality upgrade.
And this percentage of consumers continues to grow as folks like you become more knowledgeable about supplements and what they put in their body.
This is music to our ears at NatureCity because we’ve been banging this drum for many years, and if you look at our products, you’ll see almost all of our ingredients are branded.
The only other con of branded ingredients is more of an issue for me and my team - which is it takes a lot more effort to manage inventory.
Generic ingredients have multiple vendors and are generally easy to find. With branded ingredients, you have one source – and if they have a problem, we have a problem.
So we work closely with our ingredient partners to minimize out of stocks, but occasionally stuff happens, and items end up on backorder.
The one thing we have always promised our clients is we will never trade down or make an inferior product - it’s better to wait and get the ingredient you deserve. And most clients appreciate this approach.
To summarize, the reasons to choose branded ingredients in supplements are:
They’re backed by human research to determine benefits, dosage, and safety.
They offer consistent quality in terms of potency and purity.
They help protect you from being a victim of fraud and counterfeit supplements.
I hope you found this helpful - you can find out more about our ingredients and products at naturecity.com.
Yours for Good Health,
Carl Pradelli
P.S. Subscribe to our YouTube channel or podcast to discover more about nutrients that can make a difference in your health!
