Are Your Joint Supplements of High Quality? - Supplements and GMP

Most of the information was derived from various reports in the Comparative Guide to Nutritional Supplements website.

Most U.S. Nutritional Supplement manufacturers use the food model Good Manufacturing Procedures (GMP) as opposed to the Pharmaceutical-model GMP. Whether or not those supplements are daily vitamins or minerals, stand alone minerals or vitamins or compound supplements for joints. This is important to consumers that they get what they buy but this is not always the case.

The Nutri-Search Corporation and Lyle MacWilliam, publisher and author of the Comparative Guide for Nutritional Supplements are leading advocates for the Pharmaceutical-model GMP, as this insures compliance with pharmaceutical-model GMP gives consumers assurance that the supplements they consume meet stringent pharmaceutical standards for content, potency, and dissolution, and do not contain unwanted impurities.

While food-model GMP provides some protection for consumers, they do not require manufacturers to follow tough and sometimes costly procedures, such as the quarantining and testing of each ingredient for purity, potency, and identity when it arrives at their facility.

Many nutritional product companies advertise “high quality supplements using high quality raw ingredients” tested through a “Quality Assurance Program”. If so, they ought to mention Pharmaceutical GMP compliance and have a certification on the label through the United States Pharmacopeia (USP) Dietary Supplement Verification Program or the NSF Dietary Supplement Certification Program.


Then and only then can the consumer rest assured that he or she is taking the highest grade supplements – why spend your money on anything else.

Purity and Potency through Pharmaceutical grade GMP is not the only issue. Safety is another one. Many U.S. studies have shown discrepancies between what is on the label and what is in the bottle. The FDA, the U.S. regulatory watchdog for food and drug safety, has long been battling unscrupulous manufacturers of nutritional products who pose concerns for public safety because the consumer could not be assured that what was on the product label was actually in the bottle.

The FDA has identified several products in the U.S. market that are not accurately labeled or that contain potentially harmful contaminants. The agency has cited the following examples of safety violations:

The use of non-food-grade chemicals in the manufacture of dietary supplements;
Product contamination with excessive amounts of lead;

Sub-optimal levels of nutritional components as claimed on the label (one product had only 35 percent of the amount of folic acid claimed on the label);

Products exceeding safe upper levels of nutrients (one manufacturer recalled a niacin product after it re­ceived reports of nausea, vomiting, liver damage and heart attack associated with the use of its product).

Consumerlab.com, a U.S.-based testing facility for dietary supplements, recently completed a study of 47 nutritional supplements and found that eleven U.S. multivitamin products—almost 25% of the products test­ed—failed their quality control tests. A number of the products were significantly short in the amount of important vitamins or minerals. Some contained too much lead and another failed to break apart properly for absorption. To review this report, log on to www.consumerlab.com

The bottom line is that to be sure that Nutritional Supplements may or may not help your chronic joint pain, you must ensure that the products you try are of the best quality. I know that after almost 20 years of trying poor quality joint supplements, if I was not convinced to try joint supplements for my chronic knee pain one more time, this time using high quality pharmaceutical grade supplements then I may have never known the amount of relief that physical mobility that I enjoy now.


Let the buyer beware.