If your goal is to truly improve your health, then you need to pay attention to what you are putting in your mouth. This applies to supplements as well as food. We urge you to resist the temptation to be "penny wise and pound foolish" when it comes to purchasing herbs, nutritional supplements and natural remedies in general.
Based on over fifteen years of research together with invaluable personal experience, we believe that the vast majority of supplements in the marketplace today are a waste of money AND time for several reasons - the most important of which is inferior quality. We use our products personally because we have found them to be the highest quality and best values in the industry.
Good Manufacturing Practices have helped raised industry standards but they are not enough. For example, this is what WEBMD has to say about the state of the herbal industry in a segment titled Before You go Herbal:
"What you see with an herbal remedy isn't always what you get. . . There can be differences in what's in them from batch to batch or even from pill to pill. . . The ingredients listed on the label aren't always accurate indicators of what you'll find inside the bottle. When they were tested, some herbal remedies were found to contain prescription-strength medications, meaning they could share the same side effects as those medications."
Part of what sets Nature's Sunshine apart from the pack is its unflagging commitment to quality. Its testing program is an integral part of this commitment. NSP tests all incoming material for purity and potency, routinely rejecting about 2% of tested raw materials each year. These rejected batches are then marketed to other companies whose standards may not be as stringent as NSP's.
In addition, Quality Assurance personnel regularly travel the world in order to personally inspect and closely scrutinize, every step of the various steps in raw materials processing that vendors employ, this to ensure the highest quality raw materials. Steps includes growing and harvesting procedures; handling and cleaning methods; how well equipment and the manufacturing plant is maintained and how carefully required documentation is kept.
In-depth herbal knowledge of the Quality Assurance team also means that you always get the right species and part of the plant. What all of this means for you is that you get exactly what is listed on the label and nothing else, and you get it at the correct potency and activity levels. All of this care and attention makes NSP products not only safe but effective as well.
Although the supplement industry is hardly alone in this criticism, it is nevertheless a fact that fraud and a variety of deceptive practices are rife throughout the industry, and you cannot count on so-called protections, including "Certification Seals", "Seal of approvals" and other "guarantees" - which are awarded for a fee through trade groups such as the Council for Responsible Nutrition (CRN) and the National Nutritional Foods Association (NNFA) - to protect you.
Further, when you follow the money, you find that all the natural foods/supplement trade associations worldwide are controlled from the top down by pharmaceutical interests whose main focus is on drug profits - and most certainly not on the effectiveness of particular supplements. Just as problematic is the fact that the larger supplement companies dominate the trade associations, and their primary interest is market share - whether or not said coveted market share comes at the expense of the consumer.
While there are a number of very good supplement manufacturers, the process of finding them is difficult at best, especially for the average consumer. Even when good, reliable companies are found, the competition is so intense that often they are driven out of business or taken over by larger companies, particularly by drug companies where profits become paramount.
Competition can become so intense in fact that even highly principled companies can succumb to taking shortcuts or compromising quality in order to survive. We have even found instances where products from Nature's Sunshine have been repackaged with inferior ingredients or sold through a second party past the expiration date - at low, low prices of course. This is the brutal reality of the supplement industry today.
And this is why we have come to rely primarily on specific products from a select number of relatively small, independently owned companies we have carefully researched and whom we find to be reliable, consistent, value-driven and dedicated to deliver products superior to most - and often any - of what can be found in the marketplace today. Chief among these is Nature's Sunshine.
When you do make purchases through a health store, rely on your own in-depth research on the product and its manufacturer to make selections - and do patronize the small, locally owned stores as much as possible.