Chris’s Corner: Safe Supplement Buyer’s Guide, Part 1
Why is Amazon a terrible source for supplements?
You may be expecting me to answer that question by expounding on the virtues of supporting your local economy instead of a guy in a three-way, multi-billionaire space race with a guy who sells cars and another guy who sells plane tickets, but that’s not my reason for writing today.
Instead, I’d like to focus on safety and getting what you pay for. For the same reason I suggest avoiding Amazon for supplements, I also suggest avoiding Walmart.com, and eBay. If the line from the Sesame Street jingle “one of these things just doesn’t belong” just went through your head, I’d argue these three sources are not that different in terms of knowing where your stuff is coming from. We all know eBay does not sell anything itself, but you might be surprised to hear that Amazon only sells about 41% of products on their site according to statista.com. Where does the rest come from? The 1.9 million individual third-party sellers. Walmart.com statistics are a little harder to come by but they have as many as 150 thousand individual sellers themselves. In other words, these are all massive platforms open to nearly anybody in the world who has something to sell. On the whole, this makes for an amazing marketplace. If I want new internal sleeves for my vinyl I have hundreds of options from dozens of sources. However, with great power comes great responsibility (to your health).
Let’s say I had a $1,000 case of probiotics I threw into the bed of my pickup and forgot about for a year. I discover the probiotics in the middle of August baking, pretty expired, and probably very dead. Now I don’t want to tarnish my reputation by selling bad product from my physical store where people can come back and complain so I remove the expiration dates with rubbing alcohol and set up an online store called Honest Larry’s Discount Supplements and Computer Peripherals because I also have a couple printers with dried up ink cartridges that are too expensive to replace. I have just one last step: connect my store to Amazon, Walmart.com, and eBay. I want a few other things in my store so I buy a case of amber bottles and a case of the cheapest vitamin C I can find. I transfer the vitamin C to the amber bottles and photocopy the label off an $80 supplement I have on the shelf in my legitimate store. Voila!, my store has grown. Unfortunately, the bad reviews and complaints start coming in causing all three platforms to shut the stores down. Yay, a win for the consumer! Larry will have to hang up his USB computer mice and find another way to scam people. So I do. I open a new store called Emily’s Herbs and Car Parts, because I have another case of expired supplements and just replaced the tires on my pickup.
You might be thinking, “Damn, Chris should write fiction for a living; he is a very creative storyteller”. The fact is I used two actual examples of fraudulent behavior from Amazon sellers. One of them we saw first-hand when a patient brought in her purchase saying the bottle didn’t look right, and the other has been reported by colleagues of Dr. Oppitz. Most of the sellers are legitimate, and you may never have an issue, however, I prefer to stick with sources who sell everything directly thus avoiding the potential risk of using third party sellers. After all, there may be other issues out there that are not so easy to detect. Maybe the pills in the bottle are filled with cheap herbs tainted with mold & heavy metals because they weren’t handled, prepared, and tested properly. How would I know if Emily got herself a better printer & plastic shrink wrap for the caps? I’m not writing this to ask you to buy everything from us; I’m writing this to ask you, for your own safety, to carefully consider the source of the supplements you expect to keep you healthy.
There are lots of good places to buy supplements that won’t bankroll another ego-trip to space. In our experience chiropractors, like naturopaths, always stock good supplements. In Park Rapids we have 3rd Street Market, in Menahga we have A Clean Plate, in Nevis we have Imani Natural Products, in Bemidji we have Harmony and Sunrise. I am unable to cover every community our patients live in; these are just the ones we know well and can recommend. If you prefer to (or have to) shop online there’s Swanson, VitaCost, iHerb, and Professional Supplement Center to name a few. Do some of the online stores sell low-quality supplements along side professional supplements? Yes. Do I fear I’ll receive a bottle of mystery pills with a photo-copied label missing it’s expiration date? No.
Stay tuned for Part 2!
Chris Oppitz
