US-based natural products company NOW Foods has made public the results of tests it carried out on CoQ10 and SAMe products purchased on amazon.com, which showed potency far below label claims.
“Today, especially, more people are buying their supplements online, which is why we are making this information public,” said Dan Richard, vice president of global sales and marketing. “NOW takes defrauding consumers personally and it is in the best interest of the entire dietary supplements (industry) to identify and work to purge such bad actors to protect consumers.”
Serious questions
“We initially tested the CoQ10 because we had serious questions about the dosage form: it is almost impossible to run this potency (400mg) of sticky CoQ10 in a dry capsule on machines,” said Aaron Secrist, vice president of quality and regulatory affairs. “We suspected the SAMe to be low potency, which they were, with several delivered in an unstable form.”
“NOW takes defrauding consumers personally and it is in the best interest of the entire dietary supplements (industry) to identify and work to purge such bad actors”
All samples were tested by High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) in NOW’s labs using validated methods.
The CoQ10 products, which were almost all labeled as 400mg in dry capsules, contained far below the claimed amount, if any CoQ10 was detected at all, says NOW. Five of the ten products it tested, which it names on its website, were find to contain less than 20% of labelled potency.
This is the second time the company tested these and similar no-name brands purchased on Amazon, and it says these new results are “consistent with what was found two years ago”.
NOW also tested what “suspicious” SAMe dietary supplements available on amazon.com. NOW suspected the products they tested to be low potency or in an unstable form, win its testing confirmed (again, many products were found to contain actives at significantly lower levels than labelled, in to instances an non-detectable levels).
Mathematical impossibility
NOW says one additional brand, “badly mislabeled their product by claiming 1500 mg SAM-e from “500 mg as adenosyl-methionine-disulfate tosylate” in only two capsules, a mathematical impossibility”.
“As a business partner of Amazon, we did report this information to them and hope they will take action,” Richard said. “Additionally, NOW has provided this information to other supplement brands, FDA, and to trade associations.”
NPG asked Amazon to comment on NOW’s test findings but has not received a reply from the company as yet.
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